


As Summer into Autumn Slips

by pantagruel



Category: Spinning Silver - Naomi Novik
Genre: Court Intrigues, F/M, M/M, Magreta dies very early on, Murder Mystery, Post-Canon, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2019-06-21 16:01:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 36,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15561366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pantagruel/pseuds/pantagruel
Summary: Mirnatius and Irina, still wary of each other, play an elaborate game of cat and mouse while navigating court intrigues, murderous attacks, and growing tensions in their realm.





	1. Chapter 1

My darling tsarina’s old maid has given up the ghost. Naturally, half of my court believes that this is my doing - that her life ended on my command. 

I can tell that my personal physician, huffing asthmatic complaints as he clambers up the narrow servants’ staircase behind me, thinks that I’ve called him to shroud the real cause of Magreta’s death – likely poison or curse work – in harmless sounding medical mumbo jumbo. And he’d oblige, no doubt, given that three heavily armed members of my guard are bringing up the rear. The room into which we are led is small but well furnished, stuffy with the heat of summer. We’re not alone: next to the hearth, Lydia Vitkus, keeper of the keys of the imperial palace is towering over the young scullery maid who found the body, firing salvo after salvo of stern questions. She stops briefly so that she and the maid can curtsy perfunctorily. Rising, Vitkus turns her gaze on me and I can see that I’ve made a mistake in coming. It’s obvious that she, too, believes that I’m behind this murder – why else would I have taken the trouble to rise from my breakfast and come all this way, traversing the courtyards and long vaulted corridors, lined by silent statues and equally silent footmen? She thinks that I’m here to gloat, and she’s already calculating how this move will realign alliances and stir the wasp nest of my court into a frenzy of gossip and intrigue.

I’d expected to find the body on the bed, but apparently that’s not where Magreta died. She’s in the armchair by the open window. The morning breeze stirs a thin lock of grey hair that has escaped the bun in her neck. The tiny movement casts the marble stillness of her body into sharp relief. 

The physician gets to work. He pries open Magreta’s stiff eyelids to inspect her cloudy irises. Holds a mirror over her mouth, which, predictably, doesn’t fog over. All the symptoms are there: her skin looks unnaturally dry and gives off a weak odor of camphor; her tongue is black and covered in blisters – just like mine was, a couple of short weeks ago. Try dictating your last will when you’re blind, delirious, and every attempt to form basic syllables feels like you’re ineptly sloshing liquid fire around in your mouth. You sure make interesting choices. Thankfully, none of them materialized in my case because I didn’t snuff it in the end. No such luck for Magreta. 

The physician cocks his head to the side, trying and failing to gauge my mood. “It’s impossible to reach definite conclusions at this stage and even after opening the body, we might still be grasping in the dark. However, it seems not entirely unlikely that she…” He trails off, waiting for me to diagnose the cause of death in whichever way suits my scheme. He is clearly startled when I settle on the truth instead.

“… was killed by someone who used the same poison that was used on me,” is how I finish his sentence. It’s unwise and I know it (but rest assured that no one has ever been in danger of calling me Mirnatius the Wise). This murder, following on the heels of the attack on my own life – which, according to court gossip, was most likely orchestrated by Irina’s father – smacks of retaliation. And with me on public record, stating that Magreta died by the same poison that was used on me, the rumors will mushroom quickly because it’s all so very neat: the tsarina’s family valiantly tries to rid Lithvas of the tsar – the witch’s son no one ever wanted on the throne – but their plan misfires spectacularly, and look at the cruelty of the tsar’s revenge: poisoning the dear old woman, the sole companion of the tsarina’s lonely childhood.

But that’s not what happened. And for reasons both egotistical and otherwise, I need to know who murdered Magreta. She was sewing when she died, no doubt working on a new dress in questionable taste. Her fingers are still curled around a piece of black lace. It drops to the floor as the physician inspects her hands. It’s strange – I know a thing or two about lace, but I’ve never seen lace like this. The pattern weaves in and out of separate layers of lace, stitched together to form an almost relief-like structure abundant in tiny detail: vines twine around one another and shelter grossly misproportioned creatures whose predator teeth dig into their own fleshy tails. I’m all for ostentatious robes, but a lace collar featuring autosarcophagous monsters is a bold choice even for my taste. Its weight, too, is startling: for all that it looks like a flimsy bit of lace, it lays heavy in my hand. 

There is a commotion behind me. My guards click their heels together, standing to attention, while Vitkus and the scullery maid sink to the floor in a deep curtsy. And there she is. Always so composed, my tsarina. No tears, no accusations. She doesn’t so much as glance at me as she crosses the length of the small room. She bends down to kiss Magreta’s brow and everyone in this small, overpopulated room – the bumbling physician, the guards, Vitkus and the girl – freezes in astonishment: whoever helped the tsarina dress this morning didn’t think it necessary to fasten the clasp of her high-necked gown with proper care and now the powder-grey tulle is sliding apart, exposing her neck and a hand’s width of pale skin between her shoulder blades. She is oblivious to it, and I can tell that while each and every one of our loyal subjects present are racking their brains to figure out what court protocol has to say about the appropriate response to a sartorial malfunction at an hour of great sadness, none of them are prepared to act.

It’s up to me, then. I could parade her through the palace like this. Take revenge for all the little humiliations; for her constant condescension; most of all, for her nightly indiscretions. 

She claimed me to save me from Chernobog, but that doesn’t mean that she trusts me, or is planning to rule by my side. With her father whispering schemes into her ear and all the different court factions vying for her favour, her cold clockwork mind must be busy at all hours, weighing up costs, possible gains, and casualties. I’ve always been a dispensable casualty to her, still am. And the games that we’re playing – verbal traps and court intrigues by day, and an altogether more beguiling set of intrigues by night – haven’t changed that.

Our communication operates on lies rather than any kind of real connection, or, heavens forbid, trust. We both know it. Commenting on my tsarina’s grief, offering comfort, feels impossible. 

Instead, I take Magreta’s shawl from the bed and step behind Irina to drape it around her shoulders. “You look hideous, my darling, as always,” I drawl. “And rather shockingly en déshabillé. Why don't you wear this and have the maid who dressed you whipped?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Here's another chapter - I hope you like it! :) I have the story pretty much fully plotted out and am aiming for weekly updates (more frequently if I can manage it). Thanks so much for reading!

The most boring event of the week comes a day early. Usually, council meetings take place on every seventh day – but for some reason that escapes me now, my advisors were adamant last night that we reschedule the meeting. I can’t remember that I agreed to it, but then again I was phenomenally drunk at the time.

We meet, as we always do, in the reception room adjacent to the throne room. The shutters of the lattice windows are mostly closed against the heat of the late summer sun. There is a sweet foul smell in the air that probably belongs to the wilting flowers in the cornucopia-shaped centrepiece on the table. I sit in my father’s chair, in this, his favourite room, and think about how much he’d hate to see me as his successor. Usually, this thought cheers me. Today, it only adds to the throbbing behind my temples.

Council meetings are one of many things that have changed for the worse since my entry into the blessed state of matrimony. Irina attends them religiously, and she’s always taking notes and asking questions that annoy the councillors. But she’s wearing her silver crown and so they answer her. I hate her for it. When I first started attending these meetings as a scrawny thirteen-year old, I had questions too – including really basic ones, like “Where do I sit?”, “Who are these men and what kind of power do they hold?”, or – slightly more pressing, “How am I to make sense of any of these papers when even Karolis wasn’t ever bored enough to teach me how to read?“ Back then, neither the regent nor the councillors cared to offer explanations. Instead, they let me blunder into mistake after mistake.

Finally, I was given a tutor, a kindly old scholar, who did his best to fill the sizable holes in my education. My demon took no interest in him, which surprised me until I learned that my teacher was himself something other than human. He was an enthusiastic gardener and everyone kept wondering what it was that made his plants grow so spectacularly. Until they didn’t wonder anymore because I’d told them to dig underneath his beautiful beds of flowers and they’d found the worm-eaten corpses. He’d taught me well although we never got beyond the basics. I drafted his death warrant myself.

Something is in the air today. The councillors, five of them and none of them under seventy, are shuffling their papers and speaking in hushed voices. Irina’s seat is empty. She travelled to Vysnia yesterday to bury Magreta in the family vault, and she’s not due back until tonight. The meeting begins and amber is more quickly formed than we proceed through the agenda.

The Treasurer, Councillor Gaida, reports dwindling tax revenues from wool export. Councillor Nievsky, a frog-like little man who is nominally our spy master but really only interested in appointing each and every member of his grotesquely extensive family to a lucrative military post, explains that his informants are working tirelessly to gather information on Margreta’s murder and the attempt on my life. Which is to say they’ve got absolutely nothing.

Next up, Councillor Mazeika advises postponing the Sejm, the national assembly of envoys from all our provinces, to mid-winter, reasoning that the local rulers in the south are tied up with putting down peasant revolts. The Keeper of the Seals disagrees and points out that the absence of the southern lords might in fact smooth the Sejm’s ratification of the new legislation regarding conscription. And so it continues.

In my mind, I can hear the kinds of questions that my tsarina would ask, and from time to time I voice them just to vex the councillors. They don’t like it. I’ve never interfered in their running of the government before. With my hold on the throne secured by my mother’s bargain with Chernobog, it always seemed a waste of time.

The matter that we’re discussing now is a small one – there’s been another _flamer_ in Montvilas, an hour south from the capital – but I can see that Nievsky is tense all of a sudden, and I don’t like the manner in which he and the other councillors are batting away my questions like pesky flies. As far as I can tell, we haven’t got the slightest clue what motivates these people that we call _flamers_ for their unfortunate habit of setting themselves on fire in town squares and assembly halls. It stared in the spring but is spreading quickly: all over the realm, people are turning themselves into human torches for no apparent reason. I gather from the report of Councillor Brakas that the Montvilas _flamer_ , a young musician, is badly burned but miraculously still alive. I’m informed that my council has already authorized the duke of Montvilas to proceed with the boy’s execution.

“That seems like an eminently unwise course of action.” Nievsky doesn’t like to be interrupted. So I wait until he starts another sentence before I cut him off again. “He’s the first _flamer_ to survive. Why don’t we bring him to the capital to question him? Find out if he’s possessed or part of a sect or … something else that we might want to know of?”

“It would look like leniency,” Nievsky says. “Set a bad precedent. We’ve got enough on our hands with the peasant revolts. The last thing we need is more _flamers_ , which is precisely what we’ll get if these people see that these antics will get them the tsar’s attention.”

“We don’t have to make this pleasant for the _flamer_. We can always torture him,” I suggest sweetly. “Put his head on a spike afterwards.”

“His burns are too severe,” Brakas says with an air of finality. “Surely, he wouldn’t survive the cart ride to the capital.”

Gaidas adds: “And it’s too late to send word to the duke anyway. For all that we know, the execution might already be under way.”

Their resistance irks me. I don’t have it in me to be a good ruler, but I might yet become a semi-competent one out of pure spite. “Send our fastest rider. I want the execution stopped. And I will send someone to question the _flamer_ in Montvilas.”

You could slice the silence that follows. But then, after a long moment, the council jolts into action. The scribe is dispatched to send my messenger on his way. Once he’s left the room, Nievsky carefully staples his fingers, blows out a breath, and says: “Right. Now that this matter has been resolved, I’m afraid there is another issue that deserves your consideration, your Imperial Highness.”

“Such as?”

“The tsarina is undoubtedly very beautiful,” Nievsky begins.

“Everybody tells me so.”

“However,” Nievsky continues, “it cannot be denied that politically, this union has been… shall we say…”

“Imprudent,” Barkas supplies.

“I was going to say _rash_ ,” Nievsky continues. “In any case, many of your loyal subjects have noted the … shall we say…

“Hostility,” Brakas chimes in brightly.

Nievsky shoots him an annoyed look. “…I was going to say: _the lack of warmth_ between the young tsarina and your Imperial Highness. And we have taken this as an auspicious sign that you might not be averse to moving… forward.”

I turn to Brakas. “Why don’t you paraphrase _forward_?”

“Let me think on it, your Imperial Highness…”

Nievsky casts his gaze heavenwards. “Many a young tsar has come to regret marital choices rashly made. And young women of a nervous disposition, whose health dwindles in the suffocating environs of the capital, often find themselves craving a more quiet life and the solicitude of kind guardians.”

What Nievsky is suggesting is that we pack my darling tsarina off to a remote monastery where nuns skilled in the properties of plants – medicinal and otherwise – can engineer a long wasting disease, followed by a merciful death.

“And afterwards?” I ask. “Whom am I going to marry next?”

“Our coffers are empty,” says the Treasurer. “Last year’s bad harvest nearly ruined us. We don’t have the means to hire mercenaries. What are we to do once the southern lords are no longer able to stem the tide of the peasant revolts?”

“The Russian Tsardom is eyeing Lithvas,” Mazeika adds. “Everybody knows that. We need a strong ally to the South.”

“The House of Habsburg?” I offer.

Nievsky looks hopeful. “Precisely. Princess Elisabeth has just turned nineteen.” He pulls a small, oval portrait from his cache of papers. “She is very beautiful. Some might say even more beautiful than the tsarina.”

I cast a quick look at the miniature. “I’m inclined to agree.”

“So you will think on it?”

I think I know what Irina would do in my place. Chances are, she’s already come to the very same conclusions that my able councillors have just outlined. This very minute, she might be plotting to replace me with a more suitable, more powerful ally.

I didn’t choose Irina. Chernobog did. And then she defeated him. “I will think on it.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In honour of Naomi Novik's expert wrangling of six different POVs, I'm writing this fic - a lot less expertly - from 3 POVs. It's not going to be a massive surprise who POV #2 is (see below), but there is still one more to come!

It's the middle of the afternoon. The heat of the August sun has hushed all the chatter and laughter to rest, and a strange quiet has descended over the palace garden. All around us, young courtiers and their ladies, dressed in diaphanous summer silks, are lounging on colourful cushions under the ancient trees. They make me think of lazily drowsing lions, their claws idle until they wake up hungry.

They are still enthralled by my Staryk silver when they are around me, but the effect wears off as soon as I’m not face to face with them, and it certainly does not keep them from enveloping each of our moves in a gossamer web of tantalizing rumours and conjectures. These days, I’m often too tired to keep track of what’s being whispered behind fluttering fans and half-closed doors. It’s a mistake – I don’t need my father to tell me that – but grief, I’ve found, is distracting: like looking into the wrong end of a telescope, it makes everything that is near seem far away.

Mirnatius, sprawled on the cushions next to me, is the most distant of them all. Unlike most members of the court, he doesn’t mind the fierce glare of the sun. Earlier, just as the sun had climbed to its highest point, he forced some of the eager young nobles in his retinue to join him for sword practice in the unroofed patio. They showed up wearing armour and Mirnatius showed up wearing what he’s wearing now – soft, closely fitting trousers and a richly embroidered white shirt. Knowing well enough what would happen to them if the tip of their sword so much as grazed the tsar’s pristine skin, the young gallants, sweating in their chain shirts and befuddled by the heat, tripped themselves and each other while Mirnatius whirled among them, careless as a child.

Now, with his eyes closed to slits and his elegant limbs relaxed and heavy, you might think him half asleep. His voice, however, is sharp. “It has been brought to my attention that your father has taken a house, stately enough for entertaining, here in Koron. I wonder what might have prompted this move?”

“A father’s devotion surely needs no excuse,” I offer demurely.

“Devotion to what? Not to you, my darling, make no mistake. It’s always been glaringly obvious that your father is political schemer first and father second. And if he’s _devoted_ to a cause that requires his presence in the capital, I’d like to know what it is.”

I don’t think my father has picked his cause yet. Right now, he’s too busy making himself invaluable to me. He’s competing with all the other hungry old wolves – councillors, veteran generals, and cardinals – who are keen to teach me how to hold on to my throne so that they can stand right behind it. I rely on my father because it’s easier to sidestep manipulation when it’s delivered in familiar fashion. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself. Magreta wasn’t so sure. But of course Magreta is dead and can counsel me no more.

Mirnatius has turned his attention to the wasp that has been hovering in the vicinity of his bowl of blackberries for the last half an hour. He’s wasting the last scraps of his dwindling magical powers to irritate the insect, attacking it with two short blades of grass which spin through the windless air like tiny swords.

“Do you think it was him?” he asks evenly, and it’s only then that I realize that he’s not wasting his magic after all. He knows that I don’t react well to wasp stings, and he’s using this little display to deliver a wordless threat.

“The plot to poison you? No, I don’t think so.” I’ve considered this scenario myself, but the timing makes no sense. “I don’t see how he’d profit from your death at this moment. Even if my father had his sights set on a regency, he’d need an heir to the throne first.”

Mirnatius is putting renewed energy into pestering the wasp, but he doesn’t contradict me, which probably means that I’ve just confirmed conclusions he’d already drawn himself. It’s unlikely, after all, that he hasn’t given due consideration to the spectre of another regency. I know that there are more reasons than one for his reluctance to bed me, but I’m sure that it has occurred to him that getting me with child will incite his opponents to action.

“And what about Magreta?” he asks. “It’s easy to see how her death plays into your father’s hands. It isolates you, and will likely make you more reliant on him. And pinning the murder on me really does nothing for my already tattered reputation, which I’m sure is a plus in his book.”

“Yes.” It’s more painful to think about my father’s potential involvement in Magreta’s murder because regarding this I’m less certain. “It’s plausible. But I don’t think that that’s what happened. My father takes small risks, never big ones. If he was revealed to be behind her murder, he’d lose everything: his influence, his access to me, very possibly his life. This kind of gamble doesn’t suit him.”

“Hmm.” Mirnatius reaches behind him and pulls out a piece of black cloth. Not cloth, lace. He drops it into my lap. “I found this clutched in Magreta’s hand. Does it mean anything to you?”

The lace is beautifully wrought, but I get the strangest feeling from looking at the pattern. There is an air of perversity to it: tumescent vines strangling drooping, half-opened flowers while monstrous creatures devour their own flesh. I could swear that each time I blink the thicket of vines grows denser.

“No.” I hand it back. “But the design is all wrong for Magreta. She would never have chosen this for a dress of mine.”

He gives a small nod. “I’ll hold on to it for now. And you should keep an eye on your father’s movements. Don’t trust him.”

“I don’t. Trust him, I mean. Or you, for that matter.”

“Seems wise.” Mirnatius smiles viciously. He flicks his hand and the blades of grass drop to the ground, releasing the wasp.

My hand goes up in instinctive alarm but it’s too late: there is a sharp pain on the side of my palm. The wasp is still there when Mirnatius snatches up my hand. He swats it away, and then he’s using his teeth to extract the stinger. He spits it out, then returns his mouth to the sting and sucks on it to draw out the venom. It’s painful – and so much besides: I’m already a little dizzy and short-winded, but that only intensifies the sensation of warm lips and tongue and the sharp graze of his teeth against my skin. I’ve never felt his – or any man’s – lips on my skin, and for a moment it makes me feel like one of the leaves that form a canopy high above us – trembly and pliant and almost translucent with summer light.

Mirnatius is using his teeth again, and in the same moment he lifts his eyes to mine. I think of my whisper-quiet room at night. Of gutted candles, his gaze on me, and all the things we have and haven’t done.

There is a triumphant glint in his eyes, and I can feel the warmth in my cheeks, as he pulls away. “Careful, my darling. You look a little too eager to get stung again.”

Soon, there will be hives running up my arm, and I will have to lie down. I gather my reports and writing utensils, slip my feet into my soft leather shoes and use a low-hanging branch to pull myself up. I sway for a moment, but then I manage to unlace the tight sleeve cuff that covers my left wrist. I am the only girl in the palace garden to wear a long-sleeved robe, the only one to carry a secret on her wrist.

The silver bracelet that until now has been pressed against my skin by the tight fit of the cuff swings free and the strings of delicate chain mail links jangle softly. Behind me, I can hear Mirnatius’s sharp intake of breath.

I turn around and it’s there, written plainly on his face, guilt and shame and raw, helpless need, all twisted together, all for me. I smile. “Thank you for soothing the sting.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello - sorry I'm a little late posting this - but it's twice as long as previous chapters, so there is that. :)

The banquet hall is aglow with candles and golden banners, the tables richly decorated with jewelled figurines of dragons, half as tall as I am. The tsarina and I sit at the raised top table under a gold brocade canopy, enjoying the very limited delights of the council’s conversational powers. Perspiring footmen are circling through the room, serving far too many guests far too much food. Absolutely everyone is here: members of court, town dignitaries, and representatives of the guilds. All have gathered for the annual night of revels held in commemoration of Dragon Day.

Right now, councillor Mazeika is stepping forward to recite the excruciatingly long-winded Toast to Koron that one of my self-aggrandizing ancestors penned three centuries ago. The Toast tells the story of how my father’s family won the throne thanks to an inspired sewing trick. According to the legend, there once lived a dragon in a cave hacked deep into the hill upon which the palace sits. The dragon was perpetually hungry and helped himself to cattle and the odd blushing maiden. Along came a plucky young shoemaker who fed the poor beast a ram’s hide which he’d stuffed with smouldering sulphur and sewn shut. The entrails of the dragon caught fire and he burned to death from the inside out. In thanks the king gave the shoemaker his own daughter in marriage and they lived happily ever after.

I remember sneaking onto the gallery as a small child to watch the revellers and listen to the Toast. I always rooted for the dragon, blissfully oblivious to the irony.

Mazeika is about to reach the grand finale, when my own little shoemaker leans in and points discreetly to the entrance of the banquet hall. “Ilias and Vassilia have returned from Wiedén! But I think something is wrong…” Irina squints to get a better view. “They look distraught. And who is the man next to Vassilia?”

I do my own bit of squinting. “Judging from his coat he’s the new ambassador of the Habsburg Empire. He was due to arrive from Wiedén as well. Maybe they travelled together?”

The seneschal herds the happy couple and the ambassador to our table. The ambassador is a gaunt, chinless man of uncertain age. I have no doubt whatsoever that this visit was prompted by one of Nievsky’s carefully worded letters to the Habsburg empress, hinting at the possibility of mutually beneficial arrangements. From the looks of it, the ambassador can’t recall a single facet of these beneficial arrangements, or any detail of his mission, now that he’s face to face with the mirage of my tsarina decked out in full regalia. He bows deeply and blushes in a wildly unbecoming manner before stammering his thanks for the hospitality of my court.

Ilias and Vassilia step forward next. They’ve been traveling for the last couple of months, visiting the independent duchies of Longines and latterly spending time at the court of the Habsburg Empire in Wiedén. Their first piece of news is evident before they’ve uttered a single word: Vassilia is pregnant, emphatically so. She’s either carrying triplets, or she conceived a good while before we married her off to Ilias. From the stricken look on Ilias’s face, I take it that triplets are an unlikely outcome.

“We share in your joy,” I say as Vassilia sinks down in a curtsy and Ilias bows formally. “I trust that you’ve had a pleasant journey back.”

“Thank you,” Ilias responds stiffly. “Less than pleasant. We had promised to visit Vassilia’s sister in Sopra on our way back from Wiedén, and therefore travelled via the southern provinces... I’m surprised to find that you’ve chosen to celebrate Dragon Day in the usual manner.”

“And why is that?”

“Haven’t you had news lately from the provinces?” There is urgency now in Ilias’s voice, and his gaze swings from me to Irina. “Don’t you know?”

I’m a little relieved that Irina looks as puzzled as I feel. The southern provinces are the realm’s granary, but their rich soil is pretty much the only thing that recommends them. There are no towns worthy of the name, just a couple of boyar strongholds. Hardly anyone travels there by choice, since trade with our neighbours in the south – Habsburg and Longines – flows along the Amber Road that connects the coastal regions in the north with the Mediterranean sea in the south.

“We had a report in council this morning,” Irina says slowly. “The boyars in the south send word every other week. We were informed that the truce continues, and that the boyars are confident that they can reach an understanding with the leaders of the revolt before the harvest begins in earnest next month.”

“There won’t be much left to harvest if they keep burning down the wheat fields.” This comes from Vassilia, who somehow manages to look blooming and deeply annoyed at the same time.

“It’s carnage down there,” Ilias adds. “Villages destroyed by fire. Bodies strung up in the trees and people starving. And all the while the fighting continues because the parties involved are now pretty much evenly matched.”

Irina looks dismayed. I know what she’s about to say – she wants to hold a council meeting this very minute, but that’s impossible. Neither she nor I care much about Dragon Night, but the people who have gathered in this hall to celebrate with us very much do. To them it’s the most important night of the year. If anything happens tonight that smacks of an emergency, it will be taken as a symptom of a much larger crisis of rule.

“We’ll call a meeting tomorrow morning.” I turn to Ilias. “Don’t say anything to anyone tonight.”

“But how…” Irina frowns. For a moment, I think that she will contradict me, but when she speaks again I realize that she’s already dissecting what little information we have, and zeroing in on the inconsistencies. “How can both groups be evenly matched? The boyars’ men are trained to fight. They must have weapons, armour, horses…? How can the peasants ever hope to defeat them?”

“They have help,” Vassilia says curtly.

“Help from whom?”

Ilias shrugs. “We don’t know. But someone is supplying them with weapons, training them too. And there are rumours that when they attack, horsemen with masked faces come to their aid.”

*

It’s late. Most of the revellers have gone home. The few men left are leaning heavily on the banquet tables, drinking. I’m leaning somewhat heavily on the table myself. There isn’t much about Brakas that I like, but he will never let you stand alone if irresponsible inebriation is the order of the day. The only downside to Brakas’s companionship is the fact that wódka makes him prone to long monologues about the military prowess of my father, and the early promise that Karolis showed as political strategist. I bet that dealing with whatever is happening in the southern provinces will require a healthy dose of either of these qualities, which makes it a little awkward that I possess… well… neither. On the bright side, I am (for now) still married to my tsarina who has a Machiavellian mind and magical beauty that makes people disturbingly keen to please her. I am sure she will be full of brilliant ideas during council meeting tomorrow morning, making me look like a hung-over oaf who has no business to sit on the throne that wasn’t his to begin with.

When Brakas is snoring gently by my side and Dragon Day is finally over, I have the best intentions to head straight back to my rooms in the west wing. But then I take my frazzled guards on a detour through the palace’s largest inner courtyard. My mother designed the layout of the four squares of plantation, all of which are surrounded by low box hedges and have a fountain in the middle. There are floating candles and flowers in the fountain basins, and the air is sweetened by the perfume of evening primroses and other nocturnal plants. Two figures emerge from the shell grotto and it’s only when they’re right in front of me that I recognise them as Prince Casimir’s wards. They are siblings – the son and daughter of his deceased sister, if I remember correctly. They’ve been at court for the last couple of months – a gesture of Casimir’s goodwill, or more likely just a well thought out ruse to ensure that these two changelings with their expensive tastes wreak havoc on another court for a while.

I’ve forgotten their names, but truth be told, I’m too drunk for polite conversation anyway. They move towards me, arms entangled and swaying into each other a little as if they’ve just been dancing. His shirt is half open and the girl is biting her lip as she approaches me, not shy at all. They look very much alike – lithe and fair and ethereally beautiful, and as she gazes up at me and he inclines his head in a show of mock-respect, I realize that they are offering, and that the terms of this offer are generous indeed: it’s one or the other or both.

I’ve never been in bed with just one other party. All my previous dalliances have been triangular affairs, with Chernobog holding the reins, so maybe it’s only apt that I continue this lovely tradition of threesomes?

The grotto really is more of a bower: roses are climbing up one of the walls and there is a low stone bench nestled into ferns. His lips are soft and her clever hands are running down my stomach and lower. There is so much skin to touch, hers smooth and cool, his slightly rougher, and I’m doggedly trying to please both of them at the same time. I close my eyes in order to conjure up pictures of what is to come – try to see it before my mind’s eye so that I can get into it: bodies entangled, her mouth on me, his hands directing me – but I can’t push my imagination beyond the moment in which desire turns to abject horror, warm pleasure displaced by terror and revulsion. I know that Chernobog is gone, but I’ve never done this without him. Apart from the very first time, I have never not known how this ends: that the man or woman in my arms is about to die an agonizing death by my hands; and that the last thing that will be on their mind, right before death claims them, is my betrayal.

I … I can’t. My body looks like it was made for pleasure, but I’ve only ever used it to perform on Chernobog’s command and now that he’s gone, I can’t even seem to go through with this empty charade of a tryst. I push them back clumsily, Casimir’s pouting wards, and try not to imagine the rumours they’re going to put into circulation post-haste as I stagger away.

I don’t think I can bear to be in my bedroom just now, with all the memories sealed inside. After some aimless rambles through the other courtyards I lose the guards and climb to the top of the old watch tower.

You can see all of Koron from up here, as well as the silhouette of the mountains to the east, but I’ve only ever come up here at night to look at the mere that snakes around palace hill. It’s really just a deep moat, dug by one of my ancestors to make the palace even more defensible, but on the north side of the hill it widens to the size of a small lake and that’s why people call it the mere.

The mere is silvered by moon light and smooth as a mirror until a gentle breeze stirs the surface and ripples chase each other to the mossy banks before stillness descends once again on the water. There is nothing more seductive than water at night. I waded into the mere a couple of times after Karolis died, but Nievsky fished me out each time.

“You still come up here?” The voice startles me. It’s Ilias, who really has no business lurking in the shadows of my watchtower at night.

“None of your business. Don’t you have a pregnant wife to attend to?”

Ilias laughs, but it’s not a happy sound. “I wanted to give you something.” He reaches into the pocket of his light overcoat. If this is another love poem in manuscript I swear I _will_ fling myself from the top of this tower after all.

It’s not a poem. It’s much, much better. Ilias is one of the very few people who know that I’ve been expanding my mother’s collection of antique Longinian jewellery for the past years. I’d be hard pressed to explain why I am so fascinated with this kind of jewellery: I certainly have no intention of wearing any of it – I simply like to _own_ pieces that have a dark history that stretches centuries back, and that are mysterious to boot because the spells the Longinian jewellers used to produce items of such breath-taking beauty are long forgotten.

Ilias has picked up a rare type of necklace during his travels. The central ornament is engraved with a peacock pattern, cascading into emeralds and tiny pearl clusters. It’s gorgeous and I can’t wait to study it in daylight.

“You like it?”

“You know I do. Now tell me what you want.”

Ilias is silent for a moment. Then he says: “Send me away for a while. I have no excuse to be anywhere but here, but I ... just need to be alone for a bit. Away from Vassilia. Away from my mother. Just send me on a diplomatic mission, I don’t mind where to.”

“How do you feel about Montvilas?”

“That’s not very far at all.”

“True. But you don’t have to return to Koron afterwards.” I think about it for a moment, hoping this is the right decision. “I want you to look into what motivates the public suicides of the _flamers_. We caught a _flamer_ alive – well, more or less alive – in Montvilas. Go and talk to him. If he coughs up any useful clues, you can follow up on them afterwards. And if he doesn’t then I’m sure you can make yourself useful in this inquiry in other ways.”

Ilias nods. “Thank you. You know,” he adds after a moment of surprisingly companionable silence, “I noticed earlier that the tsarina is wearing a bracelet from your private collection?”

“Yes.”

“Why? Doesn’t she know the first thing about the history of Longinian jewellery? She can’t be ignorant of the fact that these pieces were never meant to be worn in public… And how did she get hold of it in the first place? Surely, it’s a little brazen to start stealing from you this early into your marriage?”

“She didn’t steal it. I gave it to her.”

“You did what?” Ilias looks shocked. I quite enjoy shocking people, but his interest in this particular matter makes me queasy. “Why on earth would you do that?” Ilias asks.

“She gave me something precious in return. It’s a single bracelet, Ilias, not a _parure_. It doesn’t give her any kind of power over me. And she may be clever, but she’s as ignorant as nearly everyone else when it comes to the obscure history of foreign jewellery. Just leave it be.”

“You’re playing with fire.”

“Yes, and don’t I have practice. Good night, Ilias.”


	5. Chapter 5

Snatches of the conversation with Ilias float back into my mind over the next couple of days, usually in highly inconvenient moments – for instance when I’m trying to follow Mazeika’s report on the number of swords and lances which we need our blacksmiths to produce in order to weaponize the new artillery recruits. I wonder if Ilias spoke out of genuine worry or mere jealousy. This I know for sure: there was a time when he would gladly have worn Longinian jewellery for me.

These days though he seems mainly concerned with putting space between himself and his wife. Vassilia’s thoughts on the matter are unknown. Until I come across her in a place that suits her about as much as me, which is to say not at all: the palace library. It’s a dreary, dusty place – a labyrinth of shelves, housing thousands of books whose crumbling spines stare at you and taunt you with everything you don’t know. I’ve always been secretly afraid of the librarian – an ancient, smelly little woman called Dombatky who lives, breathes and presumably imbibes liquefied books. Dombatky doesn’t like me, but she loves Irina who spends much of her time tucked in the window seat, reading tomes that look half as heavy as her.

I was in fact hoping to find Irina, but instead I nearly trip over Vassilia, who’s sitting on the floor and leaning against one of the particularly imposing bookshelves near the fireplace. She’s balancing an open book on her rounded belly, and she looks royally annoyed to be interrupted.

“Your imperial Highness. If you would like me to get up and curtsy, I suggest that you return in a couple of minutes’ time. My delicate condition impedes rapid movement.”

“Let’s not take any risks – I don’t think Ilias is ready to be a father yet. What are you reading?”

“I really don’t want to waste the precious time of your imperial Highness...”

“Don’t worry, someone has to.” I squat next to her and leave through a couple of book pages, careful not to touch her belly. Vassilia is reading a volume of Vesalius’s _De humani corporis fabrica_ , complete with woodcuts of the womb and the placenta. “Worried about the birth?”

“Just curious.”

“Who’s the father of your child?”

Vassilia snaps the book shut. “Why, my husband, of course. And I’d very much like to know where you’ve sent him.”

“On a secret mission. _Secret_ , you see. Vassilia, your father, Prince Ulrich, has been holding the monopoly for importing lace for decades now. You must know an awful lot about lacework?”

“A little. Is Ilias part of the delegation that you’ve just sent to the southern provinces?”

I pull out the lace I found in Magra’s hand and drop it on the book’s calf-skin cover. “How about you tell me what this is and I’ll see if I can remember the whereabouts of your adoring husband.”

Vassilia wrinkles her snub nose. “This is no ordinary lace, your Imperial Majesty.”

“Now tell me something I don’t know.”

“The animation that you see when you peer very closely,” Vassilia explains slowly as if addressing an obtuse child, “that’s a sign of cursework. This kind of lace is never sold openly. My father wouldn’t dream of touching it.”

“And yet you’ve come across similar lace before.”

“I spent a few years at the Niemskean court,” Vassilia says pointedly, “before my father ordered me back to make a favourable impression on the tsar.”

Nicely played. “Well, you did. Make a favourable impression, I mean. But we both know that we are not the kind of people who can choose freely when fate and politics dictate...”

“Please,” she cuts me off. “Spare me the fate-and-politics spiel. Everyone can see that you are utterly besotted with her. No wonder, she’s somehow turned herself into the most dazzling girl in all of Lithvas. It’s very distracting.”

“Very. But you were saying about your time at the Niemskean court...?”

“Yes, well. Ensorcelled lace gloves are all the rage at the court of Niemsk, and there’s also a teeming black market in curse-carrying laces and silks. The people who buy and sell on the black market are mainly after pretty minor curses because all the more interesting patterns cost a fortune. The curse, you see, is in the pattern.” There is suddenly a sly look on Vassilia’s face. “You’ll be pleased to know, your Imperial Majesty, that the price of your pattern befits a tsar’s purse.”

“What do you mean?”

“The pattern that you’ve shown me is famous – or rather infamous – among certain circles in Niemsk. I’ve only ever seen drawings of it, but I’m fairly sure that I am not mistaken.”

Vassilia pauses once again and I come close to throttling her. “Your unborn child can look forward to your wicked talent in drawing out a story. What’s the curse?”

“It only applies if you’ve taken the lace from a dead person’s hand so I presume it’s irrelevant anyway...?”

“Just tell me what it is.”

Vassilia puts both hands on her belly as if it has suddenly become important to shield her child. “Well, you die,” she says calmly. “On the last day of the year.”

I’m suddenly glad I’m leaning against the shelf. “Good thing it’s irrelevant.”

“You die unless...”

“Unless what?”

“Unless before the year is out,” Vassilia continues, “you take the life of someone who means you and yours no harm.”

“Well, that’s a relief.”

“It is?”

I can hardly tell Vassilia that I’ve been accessory to the murder of more than two dozen fine people who meant me and mine no harm. But I’m pretty sure I can stomach one more murder to extend my life beyond the end of the year. “It is certainly less of a tragedy for Lithvas to lose an old shepherd or washing woman or someone else of whom no one has ever heard, than to lose the tsar on whom the stability of the realm depends.”

“I’m glad to hear that you have the best interests of your subjects at heart.” Vassilia, it turns out, is a little more skilled in lacing her words with irony than one might wish. “You’ve got the key to undoing your curse, your Imperial Highness, and I’d very much like to have my husband back. You promised to tell me where he is.”

I did, didn’t I? Poor Ilias. “I will have someone look into the veracity of what you've told me. In any case, what we discussed today can never leave the musty confines of this sorry room, understood?”

Vassilia nods solemnly. “If you die on the last day of the year, I’ll be happy to help spread rumours that you died of the pox.”

“Your dedication to the cause is appreciated. As regards your husband...”

“Yes?”

“He’s currently in Montvilas, and from there he is likely to travel onwards. It would be entirely foolish to follow him.”

Vassilia hands me her book. “I suggest that you read Vesalius on the travails of pregnancy, your Imperial Highness. You will learn, as I have learnt, that all pregnant women are lunatics.”

 

*

 

I don’t want to think about when we will receive the first dispatches from the delegation that we’ve sent south to inquire into the peasant revolts. And I _certainly_ don’t want to think about the curse and who might have put the lace in Magra’s cold hand for me – or Irina? – to find. But my tired mind keeps snagging on either of these two things, and as a result I spend a couple of supremely dissatisfying hours tossing and turning in my bed before I force myself to get up again.

It must be long after midnight. Moonlight spills through the high lattice windows and transforms the sculptures and furniture in my spacious bedchamber into thinned out shadows. I light a candle and take it to the Mahogany bureau that contains my collection of prints as well as two secret drawers in which I store my Longinian jewellery.

I love the feel of these strange, extravagant adornments in my hand, against my skin. The sinuous design, the silken texture of the pearls and polished gemstones, even the delicately balanced weight of the chains – everything about Longinian jewellery serves as a reminder that these pieces were fashioned to serve as emblems and conduits of exquisite sensual abandonment.

I keep returning to the pearl-studded choker that goes with the bracelet Irina has been wearing more and more. The night that I decided to make her a gift of the bracelet began much like this one. I was feeling exhausted but sleep was elusive, and so I went through my collection, lazily rearranging the pieces. At one point I noticed that I’d been playing absentmindedly with a string of pearls, and the next thing I noticed was that the warm gleam of the pearls was of the exact same shade as Irina’s throat and the shoulders she so rarely bares even though it is the fashion.

I’m not sure what possessed me to do what I did next but before the thought had fully taken shape in my mind, I was halfway through the room and slipping behind the monumental tapestry that covers the entire length of my bedchamber’s back wall. The royal apartments – that is to say my suite of rooms and Irina’s rooms adjacent to mine – are decorated with the lavish Flemish tapestries that nearly bankrupted the crown when my grandfather bought them half a century ago. My grandfather, at least that’s the story the servants tell, was also loath to pass through the antechamber and a corridor lined with guards whenever he decided to pay a conjugal visit to his wife. For this reason, he had his master builder insert a secret sliding door between his bedchamber and the queen’s chamber directly adjacent to it, hidden on both sides by the tapestries.

I had used this sliding door rather regularly to make Chernobog’s victims disappear, and had kept it well oiled all these years. It opened without a sound, allowing me to stand right behind the tapestry covering the wall of Irina’s bedchamber. This tapestry is one of the most precious artworks in the castle – a hunting scene showing Actaeon and Diana – and so threadbare in places that you can see right through it when you know where the small tears are.

I don’t know what I was hoping to see that night in my tsarina’s chamber. I think more than anything else I was thrilled by the idea and illicit pleasure of seeing her in a private, unguarded moment when all she ever presented to the court – and me – was her perfectly collected, reserved facade. I hadn’t expected her to be where she was – in the movable copper tub that servants had carried to the foot of her sumptuous bed. It was the strangest sight - utterly ridiculous and utterly charming at the same time. Two stacks of books towered right next to the tub. Irina had her nose buried in a leather-clad volume, her glorious hair piled high and messily on her head, and was humming a tune off-key while chewing on the nail of her pinkie finger.

If I’d have had to guess what she’d pick for light evening reading, I’d have gone for Machiavelli’s _The Prince_ or another primer on political scheming. Imagine my surprise when I read the golden letters printed on the spine of her book: my sober, practical tsarina was engrossed in the _Arabian Nights_ , and, from the looks of it, enjoying herself thoroughly. I’d heard rumours about her upbringing: about her father’s coldness and neglect; about the manner in which she’d been treated as an unwanted, unloved burden in her own home before winning the tsar’s hand in marriage. It had seemed far-fetched, like something out of a fairy tale, but looking at her then – at the relish with which she was devouring a book that most children of the nobility grow tired of in their early teens – made me think, for the first time, that maybe Irina’s childhood hadn’t been so different from mine.

I didn’t move, didn’t make a sound – just stayed right where I was and watched her, cocooned between the two tapestries, my restless mind finally lulled into some resemblance of peace. There came a point when the pace at which she turned the pages grew slower. She stretched her neck languidly, yawned and after a while, put the book aside. She sank a little deeper into the tub – from where I was standing, I hadn’t been able to see much of her anyway, just her profile, her thin shoulders and one, slightly knobby, knee. Her eyes were closed or almost closed – it was difficult to tell. She was still wearing her heavy ruby earrings, although their weight must have made them increasingly uncomfortable. I couldn’t stop picturing what I’d see if I walked over to her just now: her slender, supple body bare under the water, her fair skin made fairer by the dark red colour of the cut stones in her earrings.  I felt a pang of loss when she cocked her head aside and reached for one of the earrings. But instead of taking it out, she toyed with it, her thumb rubbing gentle circles along the rosetta-shaped stone that covered much of her earlobe. It stirred something in me. Over the last years, I’d participated in every conceivable kind of debauchery without feeling more than a mild tingle of titillation, but there was something about the way in which Irina fondled the jewellery that woke up a part of me that had lain dormant so long I’d almost forgotten it existed. Nothing, not even attacking hordes of eastern riders, could have forced me to withdraw now.

Her hand disappeared and she tipped her head back against the rim of the tub with a soft breathy sigh. Her throat gleamed wet with bathwater or perspiration, and I could see her swallow. A couple of wayward tendrils had escaped the hairpins and one stuck to her slightly flushed cheek. Relaxation had smoothed out the tiny frown that is almost always on her brow, and her lips seemed fuller and slightly reddened from where she had worried her lower lip with her teeth.

It took me embarrassingly long to solve the puzzle of the soft sound that I was hearing:  water lapping gently but persistently against the walls of the tub as if set in motion by some kind of stirring beneath the surface. More fool me, I guess – it had never occurred to me that girls might do that kind of thing. I watched Irina’s gorgeous flush spread from her cheeks to her throat. Suddenly one of her legs came up, the heel of her foot resting gently on the rim of the tub but the lean muscles in her thigh all tensed up. She bit her lip, as if forcing herself to silence, and when that wasn’t enough, she put her left hand to her mouth and bit down on it. It was such an oddly innocent gesture, and I wanted nothing more than to go over to her, to take her hand away and hear everything, every laboured breath and half-repressed moan.

But you’d have had to put a knife to my throat to make me interrupt this. It wasn’t just desire for her that held me spellbound: It was a far more encompassing, far deeper desire for the chance to be passive, to watch, to see pleasure build to a gentle crescendo that nothing – least of all I – could mar.

The next day, after dinner, which we take in the great hall with selected members of our court, I put a small box of polished walnut wood in my tsarina’s hand.

“You pleased me well last night, my darling,” I said, loud enough for particularly eager eavesdroppers to overhear. “You seemed a little feverish, but from what I hear the _Arabian Nights_ can inspire the most luxurious waking dreams. Will you tell me what you saw before your mind’s eye after you put the book aside?”

Irina blushed, and for a moment looked as if poised for flight. But then she squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. “Why, I saw my capricious husband. Subdued with bands... _of enduring love_ ,” she added after a drawn out moment, “and eager to serve my every whim.”

She opened the box, stared at the Longinian bracelet. “Punishment or reward?” she asked quietly, for only my ears to hear.

I felt a jolt go through me as her gaze met mine. “An incentive.”

An incentive. I think about it now, alone and more than a little cold, in my bedchamber. I want to see her wearing my choker. I want to stand behind her and trace the pearls that wrap around her neck with my finger while I whisper the history of Longinian jewellery into her ear. Perhaps I will.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back! Sorry for the delay in updating this fic. RL kind of exploded in my face last week and kept me very busy. Thank you so much for leaving kudos and comments - they really lighten up my day, and I love chatting about Spinning Silver and these characters in the comments! 
> 
> This chapter introduces the third and final POV. I hope that you like it! Two favourite characters who haven't appeared in this fic so far also make a small guest appearance... And just to clarify the timeline: my story is set in the autumn of the year in which Spinning Silver ends. So Miryem and the Staryk aren't married yet and their relationship is still in a limbo of terribly restrained pining and angst... Thanks so much for reading!

When I get to Montvilas, the sun is about to vanish behind the towers of the ill-kept city walls, and there is a strange, unseasonable chill in the air. It takes very little urging to encourage my tired horse to pick up the pace. 

No one is happy to see me. Not the duke, who doesn’t bother to hide his disdain while reading Mirnatius’s haughty letter, which gives me full authority to proceed with the _flamer_ in whichever way I see fit. Not the chief warden of the city prison, who tells me that yes, they did follow the tsar’s orders and moved the dying boy to his family’s house, and no, these orders weren’t wise because he’s only going to die more quickly in the plague-infested Jewish quarter. Least of all the stern-looking rabbi who meets me at the gate leading into the Jewish part of the town, which is separated from the rest of the city by interior walls and a canal.

The rabbi leads me through a labyrinth of narrow alleys, lined by houses built so closely together that only slivers of the darkening sky are showing between the gables and gazebos jutting forward at crazy angles. There is hardly anyone in the street, but I can feel eyes boring into my back. Whenever I turn my head quickly, there are shadows moving swiftly behind window shutters. It feels much colder here than in the rest of the city. There is a frosty breeze that billows the often-patched sheets on the line strung up between the houses high above us. The signs of closed shops creak ominously.

We stop before a door with heavy iron fittings that belongs to a tall house situated right in the crook of the alley. “You’re not welcome here,” the rabbi tells me. “The boy has done nothing wrong. We won’t allow you to hurt him.”

“I really wasn’t planning on asking for permission.”

I’ve never entered a Jew’s house before. It’s difficult to take in the details, because the rooms into which I am led aren’t well lit and there are far too many people there, mostly men but also a few women, jostling each other to get a view of me. There is hostility in their bearing, and under the hostility: fear.

“Take me to the _flamer_.”

A burly man emerges from the crowd. He looks like he hasn’t slept for days. The pouches under his eyes are purplish blue and creased. “My son is in a very bad state,” he says. “I ask you to be considerate around him. And to pay your respects to our guests.”

I make a vague gesture in the direction of the assembled crowd. “What – to all of them?”

But it turns out that the father of the _flamer_ is not referring to the people gathered in his front rooms. He is referring to the altogether more strange company assembled in the bedroom on the first floor to which he leads me next.

This group of people is remarkable in a number of ways, but the first thing that hits me is that there is a heavily armed Staryk warrior in their midst. He looks like a vindictive statue, the sharp angles and glassy planes of his face cut from ice. His white braids are brushing the low ceiling of the room and he is clad in outlandish clothes made from white leathers and opulent furs. He is deep in conversation with an old Jew, who leans heavily on his stick.

“Oh, please don’t interrupt them now!” A young woman steps quickly in front of the Staryk. The father of the _flamer_ introduces her as his daughter Basia. “They’ve nearly reached the end of the negotiations – at least that’s what I am hoping,” she explains before adding, in a whisper to her father: “I think grandfather is somewhat nettled by the realization that his own penchant for formality is put to shame by the Staryk.”

“What are they negotiating?” I ask. “And why are you extending hospitality to a Staryk?”

“So let me ask you again,” the Staryk says before Basia’s father can answer me. The Staryk’s voice is much deeper than human voices. It makes me think of the roar of icy water from the mountains that swells our rivers in the spring. “What will you give me in return for saving your grandson from certain death?”

The old Jew points his finger, knuckles gnarled with gout, at the pile of gold coins and golden trinkets on the table. “We offer you gold, my lord. A substantial amount.”

The Staryk turns slightly and his gaze comes to rest on the girl who stands by the window. She has the slightly eerie poise and self-possession of a Staryk even though she isn’t one. Her appearance is as outlandish as his, more so perhaps: her dark colouring is offset by her white cloak, lined with soft white fur, and she wears her lustrous black hair in Staryk braids interlaced with clear crystal beads.

“Gold won’t do,” the Staryk says.

The old Jew looks surprised, then angry, but before he has a chance to respond, the girl cuts it. “The terms of the offer are fair,” she says to the Staryk. “What else is it that you demand before you will close the bargain?”

The Staryk reaches inside his cloak and takes out a scroll of vellum. It’s difficult to read the expression on his glassy face but there is an almost nervous air to the manner in which he unfurls the scroll. He keeps glancing at the girl.

“These are my demands.” He puts the scroll on the table. It’s covered in small pictures, drawn with a precise if unskilled hand. A stack of ledgers. An escritoire and a writing desk. Books. A globe, an astrolabe and an abacus. A nine-stemmed candelabra and a silver cup. A large number of candles. “This and whatever else my lady wishes to add to this list.” The Staryk pauses and his gaze again darts to the girl. “Whatever else she might miss from her own world. Do you accept?” The question is addressed to the old Jew, but any fool could see that the words are meant for the girl and her alone.

There is a small pause before the girl moves forward and comes to stand right next to the Staryk. A tiny smile tugs on her stern mouth. “Will you accept our demands, grandfather?”

The old Jew shakes his head, but he is laughing quietly. “I trust that you won’t be extravagant in your additions, Miryem. So be it – we have a bargain.”

Basia moves promptly and draws back the curtain of the alcove that shelters the only bed in the room. The boy or young man – it’s impossible to tell with most of his head and body covered in bandages – on the bed emits a series of curses. His voice is soft but the words are surprisingly crude for someone preparing for death.

“Orel,” Basia says, “there is help here.”

“In addition to the tsar’s inquisitor,” I point out politely, deciding this moment is as good as any to remind the company of my presence.

“The tsar’s vulture can go fuck himself.”

That’s… unexpected. And very disrespectful. I watch Basia take off the bandages. What’s underneath makes my stomach turn. Blackened, charred skin and large patches of what looks like raw flesh. There is a foul smell in the air now. “It must be quite the ordeal to feel your own body rot while you’re still alive,” I note. “I’m sure the pain is excruciating.”

“Go bite yourself.”

The Staryk comes to stand next to the bed as Basia removes the last bandages from Orel’s head. His hair and most of his fine-boned face appear to have been spared from the disfiguring fury of the flames, but his left ear and parts of his cheek are badly burned, and there is no sight in his milky eyes.

The Staryk puts his hand against the deepest burns on his flank. The boy’s spine arches off he bed and he screams like someone is tearing out his soul as a thin layer of ice spreads slowly over his body and transforms every inch of scorched flesh into leathery, slightly raised scar tissue. It takes a long time and the boy is hoarse with screaming and crying long before it ends.

“I… thank you,” Orel says quietly when the Staryk, looking a little worse for wear and scattering droplets of water with every movement, steps back. “I still can’t see anything. Will this… just take more time?”

The Staryk shakes his head and it seems cruel that everyone in the room sees this and understands the implication before the boy does.

“The sight in your eyes is gone,” the Staryk says after a moment. “There is nothing I can do to repair it.”

“Oh.” Such a small sound. “I would be alone.”

Slowly, with much shuffling and awkward words of comfort, everyone clears out of he room. I stay. I lean against the table and read out Mirnatius’s letter. The letter in which my tsar gives me carte blanche to interrogate, torture and – if necessary – threaten with execution everyone who might be in possession of information about the motives of the _flamers_.

“Can’t wait to use the cork screws on my freshly healed thumbs?” Orel asks when I’m done.

“I would really rather not.”

“Who are you?” he asks. “You sound… young. And not terribly competent at inquisitoring.”

“I am exceedingly competent at… well, that.” I don’t need his mirthless laughter to realize that I sound pompous. “My name is Ilias Tarakanovich, Count Orlov,” I add quickly. “The tsar places his full confidence in my ability to investigate your case.”

“I see. You know what?”

“What?”

“I am not even a little confident in your ability to investigate my case.”

“Is that because you yourself don’t know why you did it?”

He looks a little taken aback. “Why do you think that?”

“You don’t strike me as the kind of person who takes his own life. You’ve got a family that’s prepared to put up with your vile temper. A community willing to put their gold together to pay for your cure. And I bet your faith doesn’t condone self-murder.”

“You know nothing about us.”

“True. You could tell me.”

“Go fuck –" 

“No,” I cut him off. “Not that again. Here’s the thing, Orel. There’ve been fifteen _flamers_ so far. The first one was a Jew. You’re a Jew. People are scared and it won’t take long until someone points the finger at your community – and then villages and Jewish quarters will burn instead of people. Do you want this?”

“What I want is for you to go away and leave us in peace.”

“Ask for something short of that.” There it is: I really am certified terrible at this. Mirnatius gives me a free rein to inflict bodily harm on suspects, and I make them offers instead.

Bizarrely though it seems to work. “I want you to take me somewhere,” Orel says after a long silence. “Somewhere I can’t get to on my own now that… Well, somewhere that I can’t get to in my current state. My family can’t know. You’ll find some kind of excuse. If you do this for me, I’ll tell you what happened on the days before I set myself alight.”

“All right.” I step closer to the bed and try to keep the immense relief out of my voice. “Do you want to shake on it?”

“Most certainly not. Now get out of my room.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still with me? Sorry for the lateness, lovely readers! Here are two chapters combined to make up for it! :)

“And here I thought you were becoming a worthy opponent.” My father moves his queen smoothly across the chessboard, capturing mine. There is no reprimand in his voice, not yet. He’s still figuring out if there is a propitious explanation for my distraction. “Perhaps you have more important things on your mind than a game of chess with your old father?”

“Perhaps I do.” I reach for another grape and let my elbow rest on the beautifully carved stone railing of the balcony while I chew the sweet flesh of the fruit. My father isn’t comfortable with heights, which is why I’ve moved our weekly meeting to my favourite balcony, perched high above the largest of the palace courtyards.

“Your healthy appetite gives me joy,” my father says. “Galina tells me it is very common in the early stages of child-bearing. Can I surmise…?”

“Don’t surmise.”

Mirnatius, with his usual flair for making a dramatic entrance, chooses this moment to appear on the battlements of the watchtower, directly opposite my balcony but separated from it by length of the courtyard. He looks like he’s come directly from the stables. His hair is wind-tousled and he’s still wearing his riding leathers. There is more colour in his cheeks than usual, and while he is as implausibly handsome as always, there is something different about him now: it’s like the exertion of riding has peeled off the top layer of his courtly veneer, and he looks a little less like the tsar, aloof and untouchable, and more like a young man who is reluctant to trade the freedom of riding in the woods against palace protocol.

He doesn’t see me – or if he does, he doesn’t let on. Instead, his gaze seems to linger on something beyond the palace walls. His shoulders sag.

“The draining of the mere has begun,” my father comments. “And from the looks of it, the tsar is less than pleased.”

I can see that much for myself, but I don’t understand Mirnatius’s disapproval. “The report of our master builder left the council no choice in the matter.” I move my rook to block my father’s attack on my king, before continuing: “Half of our curtain wall is going to drop into the mere any day now unless we proceed with the draining so that the foundations of the wall can be mended.”

“Well, it’ll certainly be interesting to see what’s lain hidden beneath the smooth surface of the mere for so long.” I can hear the pleasure in my father’s voice, and things click sickly into place a moment before he spells out the truth for me: “Where do you think did our revered tsar hide the bodies of all the people he killed over the years? I bet a good number of them ended up in the mere.”

The feeling inside me is a churning, nauseous tide. I know that Mirnatius is guilty of… not murder, precisely, but definitely of something – of not doing more, trying harder to stop Chernobog. The lives taken, the families destroyed – none of this can ever be made right. But I also know that Mirnatius was handed over, by his own mother, to a fire demon who abused and hurt him from earliest childhood. Chernobog has made Mirnatius his creature, and what right do I have to judge the shell of a man left behind when Chernobog vanished?

“Time to bring up the bodies,” my father says cheerfully. “There will be talk. There are already hundreds of grisly rumours about what happened to the people who disappeared from the palace. As you can imagine quite a few of them give the witch’s son a leading role. He bathes in blood to preserve his youthful beauty, some say. Others believe that he kills for sport, or that his debauched tastes include torturing his bedfellows.”

“None of this is true.”

“Well, the truth is quite beside the point.” My father moves his knight and now both my rook and my last bishop are in peril. “Don’t you see? The fact of the matter is that once the remains of the dead are discovered, the rumour mill will once again churn into action. Mirnatius is already losing support among the people, and this will only get worse. He won’t be tsar forever. For all that we wish him a long and healthy life,” my father says levelly, “this may not come to pass.”

It’s my father who doesn’t like heights, but as I gaze down into the courtyard far below us, my own vision becomes blurry. It’s not difficult to decode my father’s words. Growing discontentment in the populace makes everything easy: it means that assassination attempts can be pinned on ragtag resistance groups even if the real conspirators are living cushy lives behind the palace walls. It also means that the people won’t turn against whoever wrests the throne from Mirnatius.

“Don’t forget to make your move,” my father says. But when my gaze returns to the chessboard, he has pushed most of the pieces aside to make room for a creased playbill. It’s an announcement for a new play called _The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Tamerlane III_ about to premier at the Bogurovsky Theatre. I can tell that my father – who has no interest in the thespian art whatsoever – is using this as a showpiece for Mirnatius’s impending fall from power.

Tsar Tamerlane III is a shadowy figure in history books, because little is known about his reign with certainty, but folklore remembers him as a depraved, power-hungry princeling, who murdered his much worthier elder brother to become tsar. People like to huddle together in cold winter nights to tell lurid stories about Tamerlane’s excesses. He turned the catacombs beneath the palace into a vast prison, they say, where he had young men and women tortured to death for his amusement. He killed his enemies without mercy and let his own people starve while he rode horses shod with gold and never wore the same garments twice.

“Have you seen a rehearsal script?” is what I ask my father. I’m still hoping that this is just a coincidence. After all, the stage company might simply have decided to put on a sensationalist play that will get people to flock to the theatre in droves. The play doesn’t have to be a scathing attack on Mirnatius as some kind of modern-day Tamerlane.

My father nods. “It’s full of fascinating revelations. Did you know that Tamerlane was the son of his father’s mistress who dabbled in the black magic? Or that he loved the arts and stopped by his torture chamber regularly to draw portraits of his victims as they trashed in death agonies?”

“I see.”

“But _do_ you? I mean do you really see what it going to happen, Irina?” My father leans forward and there is nothing playful now in his voice. I hate myself for the fact that even now there is something inside me that craves the concerned note in his voice, that warms immediately to the fantasy that this whole conversation is motivated by his regard for me, his worry about my safety. “Mirnatius will fall. The people will turn against him. And you need to be with child when that happens. It’s the only way to guarantee stability for the realm. As long as there is an heir, you will be save. We can maintain the peace. You will remarry – Prince Casimir or another suitable candidate – and then you will lead Lithvas into a period of stability and prosperity.”

“You mean _you_ will lead Lithvas?”

My father’s laughter is sudden and joyless. “That depends on you. You’re the one wearing the Staryk silver. People listen to you, not to me. You can take my advice or exile me from court. It’s your decision but my sense is that you are isolated and sorely lacking in advisors. I’m not sure you can afford to lose me.”

I swallow against the lump in my throat. “Do you know who killed Margreta? Using the same poison that was used on Mirnatius?”

He looks surprised at the non-sequitur. “Well, I guess I just assumed that the general gossip is right in this instance: that the tsar had Margreta killed in retaliation for the attempt on his life.”

“That would make sense only if Mirnatius had reason to suspect that I or someone close to me pulled the strings of the plot against him.

“I see. So what you’re asking is did _I_ try to poison the tsar?”

“Yes.”

My father picks up a couple of chess pieces that have rolled off the board before he answers. “I very much want Mirnatius dead,” he says. “He’s volatile and self-involved. He doesn’t know the first thing about ruling and isn’t interested to learn. I will move against him, but I will only do so when your safety is guaranteed.” He crumples up the playbill. Puts his white queen and my black king back on the chessboard. “I will not sacrifice your life to save Lithvas.” His gaze meets mine. “Do you believe me?”

I do. I hate him and love him, and I know that while he would forfeit my happiness in the blink of an eye, he will not throw my life into the bargain. “Yes.

My father gives a little nod. “Then you know what you have to do. Get Mirnatius to share your bed. Use the Staryk silver if he isn’t willing.”

“It doesn’t work on him. Never has. I think it’s because he’s been exposed to magic his whole life.”

“Indeed. Well in that case, I can see two plans of action. You could either… ” For a moment, my father looks deeply uncomfortable, but he regroups quickly. “… use your feminine wiles to persuade the tsar to visit your bedchamber. Or – and I think that’s by far the easier option and the one we should take – we’ll arrange for you to meet with a young Tatar of Mirnatius’s stature.”

“I’m not sure that’s what I –“

“What we don’t have,” my father cuts me off, “is time. I suggest you see how things go with the tsar over the next couple of days. If your marital bed is still cold by the end of the week, we’ll have a new guard riding with you in the mornings. I’ll make sure he has excellent manners.”

 

 

*

 

“Who’s this?” The voice comes out of nowhere and startles me so badly that the sketchpad I’ve been balancing on my knee slides to the floor.

Here’s the significant drawback to the secret door that connects my bedchamber to Irina’s: two can use it. Irina picks up my sketchpad and holds it closer to the two candles flickering on the chimneypiece. There are dark rings under her eyes and her hair, braided for the night, is a little dishevelled as if she’s spent the last hours burrowing her head into the pillows without finding sleep. She’s wearing a thin chemise with overcut sleeves that were fashionable two seasons ago. I try to focus on this inexcusable lack of sartorial intuition rather than allowing myself to notice how the cream-coloured silk clings to her body when she moves.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of this nightly invasion?"

“I couldn’t sleep. Neither could you, apparently.” She returns my drawing. “So who is the man you’re drawing?”

I want to lie, but my brain is too exhausted to come up with something plausible. “Well, if you really must know, you nosy child: it’s the face of the footman whose bones and rotten boots they found in the mere today.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“Of course I do.”

“So what are you going to do now that his remains have been found?”

I huff out a breath. It’s a silly question. “Nothing, obviously. Living in the hope that it’ll blow over. That people won’t start asking the wrong kinds of question.”

Irina perches on the armrest of the chair opposite mine. I was about to indulge in a fit of spousal civility and invite her to sit down more comfortably, but I catch myself when she points out matter-of-factly: “I think it’s far too late for that.”

“If you’ve come to gloat I suggest that you do it from the other end of the room where you’re not stealing my light. I’d like to finish this.”

“Oh.” Irina moves the candles so she’s no longer blocking their buttery light, but she stays right where she is. “If the potential political fallout was of no concern, what would you like to do about the dead footman?”

It’s the strangest idea and my mind grapples with it for a long moment, turning her words over and over, until I can get hold of the contours of what she’s suggesting. Irina thinks about the murder of the footman as something that isn’t fully over. Like coming to what you believe is the end of a story only to find that there is an epilogue, she’s saying that this murder that happened in the past is still bleeding into the present. Even now that Chernobog is gone, it isn’t over and I’m not off the hook. Even now, in the aftermath, there is an obligation to act and if I don’t live up to it, I’ll be guilty of yet another crime.

“What would you do?” Irina repeats and I feel cornered. I bet if she were in my position, she’d have her little plan for redemptive actions and heart-warming closure all worked out by now.

“Absolutely nothing,” I drawl.

“Right.” She looks disappointed. “Well, here is something else to think about.” She pushes a crumpled paper into my hand. It’s a playbill, issued by the Bogurovsky Theatre. “This play is about you. It’s not exactly flattering.”

“I’ll have the Stationer’s Company censor it then.”

“If you do that rogue performances will take place all over town, and the printers won’t be able to work fast enough to satisfy demand for copies of the script. I have a better suggestion.”

“I can’t wait to hear it.” I start sketching the curve of her cheek and her messy braid to give my fingers something to do.

She’s silent for a moment and when she speaks, the words come out a little too fast. “You and I are going to attend the play. And we’ll make sure that people are too busy ogling us than following the events shown on stage.”

“And you think the hypnotic power of your Staryk silver alone will do the trick?”

“No. We will give the people what they’ve wanted since the day the wedding was announced.”

“A public feast?”

“Romance.”

The absurdity of it makes me laugh. It doesn’t help that my practical-minded darling tsarina pulls out another sheet of paper covered in her small, neat handwriting.

“Let me guess: you’ve scripted our romance?”

“Indeed I have.” She’s blushing fiercely, but her voice is defiant. “We will begin the day by inviting selected representatives of the people to pray with us in the palace chapel. The bishop will lead the service and we will pray to be blessed with a healthy heir to the throne. Afterwards, we will break the fast with the aldermen of Koron _and_ their wives, who I’ve found are never invited to any of the palace functions. In the afternoon, we will visit the new city orphanage, play with the children and donate a sizable sum for their upkeep. There will be time for a quick visit to the prison to pardon prisoners who’ve committed minor offences. All day, whenever we’re in the public eye, we’re going to pretend that we’re … very fond of each other. And then, in the evening, we’re going to appear in the royal box of the Bogurovsky Theatre right before the performance begins.”

“A day filled with council meetings sounds pleasant by comparison. And how the heck do you want to ensure that people will be more interested in us than in the play?” I look up from my sketchpad to check that I’ve got the slightly uneven cupid’s bow of her lip right. She bites the lip in question, which isn’t helping. I’m about to reprimand her but then she answers my question and every thought of the sketch vanishes into thin air.

“The play puts a lot of emphasis on one of Tamerlane’s mistresses,” Irina says haltingly. Her whole body is tense suddenly; I can see her naked toes curl against the marble tiles. “The mistress – she was from a Longinian duchy. Tamerlane and she… they used Longinian jewellery, the magical kind, you know.”

It’s suddenly very quiet in the room, or maybe it’s just that my heartbeat is so much louder now. She raises her chin and I try to read the look in her eyes: wariness mixed with curiosity, and then, suddenly, an insolent glint that somehow conjures up a vision of Irina, curled up in my chair and wearing nothing but my jewellery. I shift in my seat and adjust the position of the sketchpad prudently.

“The kind of jewellery you own and have given me,” Irina adds, and her voice – husky and a little unsteady – tells me that I am not the only one affected by this strange new thing between us.

“I see you’ve done your research,” I say, relieved that my own voice sounds almost normal. “So what is it that you propose?”

“I’ve read the rehearsal script. The play is… quite daring. It makes it pretty clear what the jewellery is for. The actress who plays the mistress – she’s going to wear replica of Longinian pieces on stage and … people will see her and Tamerlane when they… are involved.”

“Involved. You have such a way with words, my darling. Do you want us to be _involved_ , too? In the royal box, for everyone to see?”

I can see Irina react to the words. She’s picturing it, just like I am, and for a moment she looks almost dazed. “N-no, of course not. But if you want, I’ll wear one or two of your pieces besides the bracelet. You can choose something ostentatious. People will notice my jewellery when we take our seats in the box, and then they will learn about Longinian jewellery once the play starts. They will make the connection and no one will think about the crimes of Tamerlane or what they might have to do with you because… because…”

“… because they will be too busy inserting us into the filthiest fantasies their tiny brains can cook up.” I clap slowly. “That’s an impressively risqué scheme, my darling. May I ask what you want in return for your participation in this elaborate pantomime to save my reputation?”

Irina stands up and folds her arms tightly in front of her chest. “After the play, you will visit me in my bedchamber, and you will use the corridor to do so, passing by every single guard and footman in attendance.”

I rise from my chair and make a step towards her so that I tower over her. “Will I?”

“Yes.” She looks painfully uncertain all of a sudden, but she doesn’t back down. “And then, if you want, you can leave right away through the secret door and return in the morning. Or you could stay. It’s up to you. But you have to make the palace believe that you’ve shared my bed. Otherwise you’re damaging both of us: people are already wondering why you’re reluctant to knock on my door at night.”

“Wait, do I have this right?” I take one of her cold hands in mine. “Are you propositioning me, my little grey squirrel? Knowing full well that sharing your bed comes close to political self-murder, given that it would pave the way for another regency?”

“The point,” Irina says, “in case you haven’t noticed, is to keep you alive. I doubt that you will believe me, but I don’t want a regency: I want to rule, just like you do. We just have to find a way to hold on to the throne.” And with that, she turns around and pads across the room, vanishing behind the tapestry without a sound.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all! I'm back with another chapter, sorry for the wait! This one also features brief cameos by Miryem and her Staryk. Thank you so much for reading!

Navigating the bustling streets of Montvilas with a slightly spooked horse and a fractious, recently blinded Jew in tow turns out to be a bit of a challenge. The daily market in front of the cathedral is in full swing and my horse balks every time the knife sharpener puts a new pair of scissors to his sharpening stone. Orel won’t be led, which is why I have him walk on the other side of the horse, holding on to the bridle. Every time the horse balks, Orel – who thinks touching the horse is less of an ordeal than touching me, but only just – staggers back, usually right into a stall or portly burgher woman. He’s not the apologetic kind.

So far, effusive expressions of remorse combined with liberal use of my purse have been enough to smooth over ruffled feathers. But not this time. Orel has somehow managed to knock his shoulder into the back of a luxuriously dressed girl, who promptly ends up on her knees in the mud. Unfortunately, she is chaperoned by not one but three hulking fellows. Orel’s cowl has flown back and the leader of the three pauses only briefly to punch Orel in the face before he hollers: “It’s the Jew – the _flamer_! He’s back to set us all on fire!”

“…not setting anyone on fire, fuck-wit,” Orel splutters. The words come out wetly, as if he’s choking on his own blood.

I barely have time to push Orel between myself and the horse so that he’s shielded on two sides before a mob gathers around us. For a moment, I allow myself to hope that maybe they are just here to stare at the _flamer_ that came back from the dead. But it turns out that they’d far rather throw mud and hurt him.

I tell them who I am and that I’m in Montvilas on behalf of the tsar, but I don’t think they believe me – or maybe they’re just relieved that I am alone without riders to back me up. In any case, they jostle me a little more carefully while trying even harder to hit Orel and tear him from my side.

“Enough!” I draw my sword and swing it once, twice for show - and then, instead of sticking it into the closest body I go for the far less heroic option of cutting through the ropes that secure a massive stack of squash crates. The crates come crashing down. I use the commotion to put Orel on my horse and then we make a run for it – careening through a sea of yellow squashes, Orel clinging to the horse’s neck while I let the sword cut through the air, again and again, to force people back. We get off the market square quickly, round one corner, then another one – and then I risk stopping for a moment to mount behind Orel. They’ve nearly caught up with us when I take the reigns and something heavy hits my shoulder the moment we break into gallop and put some space between us and them, and then more space, and then we’re deep in the maze of alleys that connects the market square to the docks, and even the faint echo of clamour dies down.

I slide down the horse and look up at Orel’s bloody face. “Wear your cowl. And no getting off the horse until I tell you so. Are you hurt?”

“No,” his voice is strangely flat. “But I think you are.”

“Nonsense. We need to…”

“You stink of blood,” Orel cuts in. “And when you held the reigns, I could feel that the sleeve of whatever it is that you’re wearing is soaked in something warm.”

I try to turn my head like an owl and squint down my back. My coat is in tatters and it turns out there is maybe something not quite right with my shoulder and the backside of my arm. “Right. It’s not so bad. I’ll cover it for now and get someone to look at it tonight.”

Orel looks like he wants to say something supremely rude. Maybe his imagination fails him, I don't know – in any case all he says is: “I can smell the river. How far are we from the docks?”

“Not far.”

“Good. That’s where we were headed anyway. Take us to the _Mermaid_.”

“The what?”

“Right by the river, opposite the shipyard. It’s a tawerna, among other things.”

These other things turns out to be a gambling den and a brothel. There might be some selling of contraband going on in the backroom as well, though I’m not sure: I’ve never set foot in such a sink of iniquity, and for good reason, too.

The low-life curs gathered here to whore and squander what little coin they have communicate in their own strange cant that seems to contain plenty of foreign words I’ve never heard. I can’t believe that Orel has been stupid enough to take us to another place where both of us will be killed in no time once people recognize him as the _flamer_. I take his arm, ready to back us out again discreetly, but that’s when he pushes back his cowl and all hell breaks loose.

Intriguingly, after a few moments of the mob crowding around us so closely that I can’t even draw my sword, my ears ringing with their shouting and curses, I get the sense that maybe no one has immediate plans to kill us. It would help immensely if I could make out more of what they’re saying, but it seems that most of them just want to get a good look at Orel, touch his hands or elbow him. And then a tall young woman, whose naked arms are covered in what looks very much like battle scars, parts the crowd and wrestles Orel into a clumsy embrace. Her skin is dark, far darker than the skin of anyone I’ve ever met, and she’s wearing men’s clothing including trousers, which look distinctly odd on a woman.

It’s all very strange, but I’m starting to care less because the dizziness is back, and maybe I really should have bandaged the shoulder earlier because the throbbing is a little distracting. I think I will just lean against the wall for a second and wait until the clamour dies down. I wish the wall wouldn’t be tilting quite so much. I wish I could hold on to it. I wish…

When I open my eyes, I’m lying on some kind of low divan, on my stomach – a position that no soldier should ever find himself in – and can’t push up, because someone is holding me down.

“It’s alright. Don’t make a fuss.” Orel’s knees appear in my field of vision. Then he crouches down, so that I can see his freshly scrubbed face. It’s angled slightly to the side, and his sightless eyes dart this way and that. “Turns out there was a reason why you were bleeding on me like a freshly slaughtered goat. Someone got you good. Nour is cleaning the wound right now.”

“Nour?”

“That would be me.” The voice is heavily accented, and a brown-skinned finger flicks briefly against my nose. It’s the height of insolence. “Put your head back down, the muscles in your shoulder are tensing up.” She hums quietly. Then says: “So how come you’re running with stuck-up nobs now, Orel?”

Orel sounds maliciously curious. “Does he look like a stuck-up nob?”

“Oh, right. You haven’t seen him.” There is a slightly stunned tone to her voice. She must have realized that Orel is blind by now – there is no mistaking the milky sheen of his eyes – but the magnitude of this loss doesn't seem to have sunken in until now. “Yeah, pretty much like a stuck-up toff,” she continues with forced cheer. “Expensive clothes. Built like someone you could throw into the fighting pits. Shame his face is so plain – really not quite up to your usual exacting standard.”

The impertinence is… mind-boggling. As if I’d soil my hands and family name by... –

Orel makes a sound much like a strangulated ferret. “As if I’d ever soil my hands by touching one of the tsar’s henchmen!”

His words hit me like an unexpected punch in the face. I’m not sure what’s worse – to hear my own thoughts echoed in his words, or the idea that people might look at me and see someone sunk so low as to frequent places like this to seek out male company.

“I’ll have you know that I am a married man, soon to be a father,” I force out. “You both most have gone out of your mind to suggest that I’d ever touch a man – and a Jew and guttersnipe at that! I could have you arrested for this.”

The look on Orel’s face makes me think that maybe I shouldn’t have brought his religion into this. But then it’s gone and his voice is airy once again. “I’d say that now that we’ve established Count Orlov’s proclivities, you can hurt him some more, Nour. Be quick about it, though – we can’t stay for long.”

When Nour is done dressing the wound, she takes Orel’s arm and leads us through a number of dingy backrooms and then up a rickety staircase, pausing here and there to give Orel time to trade good-natured insults with the many shady types that he seems to know here.

“Where exactly are we going?”

Nour turns and smiles, displaying a row of pearly white, slightly crooked teeth. “Orel’s lair.”

Eventually, we reach a tiny garret. There are no windows and the only source of light is the puny flame of Nour’s candle, which gives me another blessed moment of ignorance before I realize what I’m looking at. The musical instruments – two citterns and a lute – are innocent enough. But the walls are lined with shelves, and every shelve is stacked higgledy-piggledy with silver ware, jewellery boxes, all sorts of trinkets and books, so many books – most of them costly tomes, bound in beautifully embossed leather.

“What’s this then?” I ask.

“He’s the keeper of the brothel library,” Nour deadpans.

“Fantastic.” I turn to Orel. “You’re not just a _flamer_ but also a thief!”

“Was,” Orel says.

“Was?”

“ _Was_ a thief. I doubt that my impressive auditory range will do me much good in this line of work.”

“It’s not work! It’s abominable! Did you use your music to get access to the mansions of unsuspecting burghers?”

“It worked really rather well, right Nour?” Orel’s smile is wistful. I know he’s mainly doing it to drive me up the wall, but that doesn't make it any less effective. “Plus I am an excellent musician, and so well mannered. Pretty as a picture, too,” he ruffles his auburn curls, then runs a finger over the raised scar issue that covers his temple and part of his cheek, “although I guess that’s also a thing of the past.”

It’s not a thing of the past. Or maybe it is: pretty is not the word I would have chosen for him. Orel’s strange elfin features, wide set eyes and pointy chin, all angles and edges, are too sharp somehow to be called pretty. He’s stunning though – in this slightly annoying manner that snags your attention when it really shouldn’t, and the scars can’t take anything away from that. He’s a pest and his looks are the last thing I want to notice about him – but I kind of do.

God, and now we’ve all been silent for far too long, and I think I might have been staring. Nour gives me a strange look and I launch belatedly into the angry rant I should have delivered three minutes ago. “…taking you here was part of the bargain we made,” I end, a bit flustered. “Now sort out the sorry remains of your criminal career, or take care of whatever you’ve come to do here. The minute you’re done, we’re getting out of here.”

It takes forever. Orel wants Nour to sell most of his store of contraband but to hold on to a decent number of the books. It turns out that Nour can’t read which means that I’m roped in to read out the titles for Orel while Nour sorts the books into two stacks. After a while I can easily predict which of the well-thumbed books will end up in the keeper stack. Surprisingly, it’s not necessarily the most valuable volumes. Instead, Orel selects travelogues, a recent translation of Homer’s _Iliad_ , and quite a few miscellanies of verse, including a rare copy of Klemens Janeczko’s elegies that I’ve tried to get my hands on forever. I will not stoop so low as to try to buy stolen books from an unrepentant thief, but I … kind of come close for a minute.

The pages give off a strange odour as I leaf through them – ashes, maybe, or coals gone cold. “Where did you get this from?”

“Not sure.” Orel cocks his head to the side. “I think I got it the week before last. It was a busy week, but I don’t think I took that one from someone’s house…”

“The boyar’s son who came through that week,” Nour supplies. “You knicked it from his luggage while he was upstairs with Jagoda. Stupid southern brute. Bet he’s not going to try this shit with another girl anytime soon though. Jagoda kneed him in the ‘nads. He was still howling an hour later.”

When Orel is finally done, Nour draws him into a quick embrace. “Be back soon? Preferably without the nob?”

“Sure.” Orel grins, but his voice is a bit higher than usual. “I think I’ll take the old cittern with me though. Just in case… you know, just in case it takes a bit longer.”

That’s how my poor horse ends up carrying two grown men, a sack filled with books, and a cittern on our way back to the Jewish quarter. The horse is not amused, and neither am I. I’d walk but somehow even the idea of putting one foot in front of the other suddenly seems exhausting. Maybe it’s the stupid shoulder, the loss of blood, but it feels like somehow all my strength is slowly seeping out of me, and all I want to do is sleep. Sleep and shut down the voice in my head – a traitor at the best of times – whispering how badly I’ve already bungled this mission; how I’ve made a fool of myself in the tawerna; how transparent I am – how easy to read – my secret and shame laid out for the eyes of the world to feast on.

“Oi!” Orel, who’s right in front of me, nudges me with his sharp elbow. “Stop slumping, or you’re going to fall off your own horse. It can’t be far now.”

I’d been afraid of this – of sharing the horse on the ride back, his back plastered against my chest, and my hips pressed snugly against his. I’ve never touched another man like this for all that I’ve dreamed of it – lain half-awake and aching at night, imagining what it would be like to feel another man’s body straining against mine, touching me with strong, sure hands. But at least in this my fears seem to be unfounded: I’m not even a little aroused. Instead, my body seems to grow colder by the minute until it feels almost brittle, like the strange chill has hollowed out my bones so that someone could snap them like twigs.

Orel grows restless in the saddle and keeps up what must be a steady stream of insults, punctuated by elbow jabs. I can hear the tone of his words, but their meaning eludes me. My mind is strangely sluggish. I know I’m meant to interrogate Orel about what happened before he set himself on fire – he’s got to tell me, it’s part of the deal we made – but every time I try to put this into words, my thoughts turn into quicksand and I find myself being dragged deeper into memories that I usually try my best to avoid.

I’m five again, grown too tall already but slower to learn than my cousins, sneaking up to my father’s sickbed and hearing him say with his thin, raspy voice: “Not you. Fetch me someone with brains.” Then I’m fourteen, and my thoughts about other boys confuse me so much that sometimes all I can do is write them down in my ugly hand and look at them, like that will finally help me understand what’s wrong with me. But then Mirnatius finds what I’ve written, and reads it out for everyone to hear, and my mother sends me to our old servant – the mean one who likes to use his belt – and he invites Mirnatius to watch, and Mirnatius laughs and laughs as I howl with every slap of the belt.

I’m seventeen and there’s a young, new stable hand taking care of Mirnatius’s horses. He’s a bit awkward, and you can tell by his sunburned face and callused hands that he’s from the country. But he’s kind and smiles at me when no one is looking, and I think that maybe, just maybe, something might happen. Until I stop by the stables one evening and see him disappear into an empty box with Mirnatius. It’s honourless to follow them, a sharp breach of privacy, but I can’t stop myself. I watch them through a wide crack in the hardwood panelling of the box: the stable boy stands with his back to me, and when Mirnatius puts a hand on his shoulder, he goes to his knees willingly. Gets to work while Mirnatius’s eyes, distant and glowing almost golden in the light of the torches, bore into mine until I flee.

There are other memories, all of them dark, a constant onslaught, and it’s a relief to finally get off the horse when we arrive at the house of Orel’s family. They’ve just sat down for a meal: it’s a sizable group of people and the Staryk is among them still, towering somewhat stiffly next to Orel’s grandfather at the head of the table. Suddenly the woman sitting on the chair next to him turns so that her profile is revealed, and I’m so stunned that I stop in my tracks.

It’s Vassilia in lively conversation with the Staryk warrior, one hand cupped over her round belly. Orel and I end up sitting between her and the strange girl with the Staryk braids, and everything is surreal and a bit of a blur because I’m still so cold, and getting colder by the minute.

Vassilia turns and offers me a bowl of purplish soup: “You look dreadful, husband. Borscht?”

“What are you doing here? How did you find me?”

“Well, I knew where to look. And I think it’s my wifely prerogative to be by your side. Now why do you look like a freshly dug-up corpse?”

“I’m… fine. Just a little chilly.” I envy Basia, who sits closer to the hearth. If I could have a candle at least – something to warm my hands with… “W-why…” it takes two excruciating tries this time around until I get out the words, “why is it so cold in here?”

“It’s not cold,” the girl with the braids says, a touch defensive. “And if it were, all the better: none of the Staryk can endure warmth for long.” She turns to Basia: “I told you, we have to be gone within the hour. He hasn’t been well since healing Orel.”

Basia’s pretty mouth turns down at the corners: “Why don’t you let him return alone and stay with us?”

“You don’t understand…” the girl says. Her gaze flits to the Staryk and he looks up in the same moment, all the while keeping his head politely inclined to listen to her grandfather. Their gazes lock, and the girl’s voice is fierce when she finishes her sentence: “…he and I, we have a bargain.”

That weird smell – coals gone cold and ashes – is suddenly back in my nostrils, filling the back of my throat. I don’t think I could speak now, but no one addresses me and I have nothing to say myself because my thoughts veer of course once again, plunging me into another memory.

The sky is inky and I’m out in the woods. My feet are naked and bloody. I know that they will catch up soon, and this time I will not outrun them. I can’t use my right arm because something bad happened to my shoulder when they threw me onto my back this last time. They are closing in on me now: their shouts are getting louder and the soft moss beneath my soles seems to vibrate with the impact of their stomping boots. I’m not used to handling a knife with my left hand, and cutting a lopsided S into the bark of the nearest tree takes forever. The blade is sticky with resin when I’m done, and I use my skirt to clean it methodically. Then I put it to my jugular and press down.

They’re here and they’re screaming and it’s all going to be over in a moment’s time, no more pain, finally no more pain. But one of them holds onto me, clings to me even as I douse us both in lamp oil, and calls me by my name: “Ilias, Ilias, listen to me, open your eyes. Open your eyes now! You’re here with me, you don’t want to die. Open your eyes you fucking vulture – do it now or you’ll kill us both!”

When I come to myself, I’m standing in the middle of the parlour, trembling and covered in lamp oil, clutching a lit spill. Orel is by my side. His chest is heaving and he has one hand still wrapped around my arm. Everybody else has formed a stunned half-circle around us. The Staryk and the girl stand closest to us: they both look ready to strike should I so much as breathe the wrong way. Vassilia is leaning heavily on the back of her chair, face white and mask-like.

Orel turns to me. “You saw it, too, didn’t you? The forest, the knife?”

I nod. Realize that he can’t see me and croak “Yes.”

“Then I’m not mad,” Orel says quietly and tugs me down until we’re both sitting on the floor, dripping lamp oil on the carpet.

“You’re not mad,” I repeat. “Or we both are.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for sticking with me, dear readers, even though I don't manage to update this fic as often as I'd like to! I promise it's not due to my lack of excitement about the story (I'm super excited about it and so happy that I get to share it with you!), just stressed out by RL work. Anyway, here's a new chapter which I hope you will like. It's a bit more "burn" than "slow" than what has come before - although don't get too excited, this is still me and I like things to proceed at a glacial speed. ;)

I’ve put up with our officious fool of a bishop and his tragic penchant for incense; had the most boring conversations of a lifetime with a dozen priggish guild masters; and lied through my teeth about my tsarina’s beauty and decorum, and the blessed joys of married life (with the occasional suggestive wink) all morning. I think I deserve a medal, but what I get instead are orphans.

The moment we step into the courtyard of the orphanage, they swarm around us like a pack of underfed, lice-invested tiny predators. Our guards try and fail to stem this orphan-tide, and Nievsky looks like he might die of apoplexy on the spot and traumatize Kordon’s unwanted youth. 

“What in heaven’s name were you thinking?” Nievsky hisses.

“My old friend, have you forgotten? I leave the thinking to others. This is the doing of my darling tsarina.”

Said Tsarina is doing her level best to look stately and serene while two enterprising little buggers are trying to worm their way under her skirts. I’m starting to enjoy this madcap excursion a tiny bit.

Until Nievsky, still red in the face, sidles up to me: “This has to end.” His voice is low, pitched only for my ears, but he looks like he’d like to shout the words in my face. “Why are you humouring her? The tsarina is dangerous and she’s manipulating you. God, she has as good as turned you into a puppet ruler!”

“But I’ve always been a puppet ruler.” I give Nievsky my most dazzling smile while I pry a couple of tiny pauper claws of my ceremonial sword. “You know this better than anyone. Perhaps I’d like to try being someone else’s plaything for a while.”

“Don’t you dare compare my council to the snares of this duplicitous wench and her power-hungry father! You’re in grave danger – you must know that! The tsarina will move against you – that’s for certain. And you have next to no support in the populace, so she’ll get away with it and install some weakling consort in your place.”

Why does everyone feel the pressing need to tell me how much my people hate me these days? “Hey you, child!” I grab a random orphan. She’s maybe six or seven years old, has a runny nose and dirty hair. “Do you feel honoured to be in the presence of your tsar?”

She flashes her strange, madder blue eyes at me and for a moment I get an odd sense of deja vu. Then she asks with a very small voice: “What’s a _zarr_?”

“Here’s your solution,” I tell Nievsky blithely. “Let’s just keep them all ignorant and uneducated, and we’ll have nothing to fear.”

“You’re a fool, Mirnatius.”

“Careful, Nievsky. I could have your head for this.”

“But you won’t. Do you know who’s due to arrive in Koron today? Following your personal invitation?”

I’ve signed so many invitations and letters to foreign dignitaries lately that I’ve no idea what he’s getting at. Neither do I care.

“Princess Elisabeth of Habsburg,” Nievsky continues. “She’s returning to Wiedén after spending time at the court of Petersburg. I believe she was quite flattered by your ardent wish to make her acquaintance, and so she’s taking a little detour and traveling through Koron.”

Nievsky has played me, and I’ve let him because I have nothing to do with most of my own correspondence. Maybe I am a fool. “We didn’t discuss this.”

“Well, there was nothing to say. Just meet Elisabeth. She could give you a future. With the tsarina, you’re on borrowed time.” Nievsky takes my arm and I can feel the press of his hard fingers through the sleeve of my coat. “And Mirnatius? Whatever you do, don’t share Irina’s bed and give her an heir. You’d be signing your own death warrant if you do.”

I try to push this cheerful thought away whenever it floats back into my mind during the next two hours, which we spent touring the orphanage, making laboured chit-chat with the humourless nuns who are running the establishment, and “meeting the children”. This event was doubly underlined on the schedule that Irina drew up for our big romantic outing to charm the populace. She probably thinks that the good people of Koron would love to hear heart-warming stories about how their imperial majesties put crown and ceremonial sword aside to play country games with well-fed, apple-cheeked orphans. But that’s not really what happens.

Many of the children are tiny, but they look like they forgot how to play long ago. And, well – I guess in our own way Irina and I didn’t exactly have storybook childhoods either, so neither of us has the first clue what kinds of games we could suggest.

I’m sure it’s a disaster in terms of our grand mission to win the hearts of the people, but I’m actually oddly comforted by the fact that for once we’re equally bad at something. Irina’s clearly flustered, and she keeps shooting me these bewildered little glances, which honest to god make it a little bit difficult not to be charmed.

I wonder whether some of the boys might be interested in getting a proper look at the ceremonial sword, but then I have a better idea: I take the cumbersome old thing out of its sheath and use the tip to draw monsters in the sand of the courtyard. Weirdly, it’s a success. I begin by scratching the outlines of the dragon of Koron into the dirt, and it doesn’t take long for some of the older girls and boys to find sticks and join me.

We turn the sand into an army of grotesque, frightful creatures while Irina and the younger children sit on a low wall, cheering us on and making up stories about the monsters. We do this for a long time and it’s… nice somehow – to be with these not particularly well-mannered children who don’t know what a tsar is and have absolutely no designs on me apart from maybe stealing a couple of coins from my pocket.

In the end, when I’ve run out of ideas and have to resort to the monster I know best, drawing a fire-breathing demon in the sand, my ears ring with the orphans’ screeches of delight. And I’m suddenly fiercely glad that to these pauper children, a devouring fire-demon will only ever be a story, an ugly phantom in the sand that the wind will erase before the day is out.

Afterwards, we move back inside the gloomy buttery where we’re supposed to share in the children’s once-in-a-month treat of freshly fried pączkis and milk. Irina, circa fifteen very antsy orphans and I squeeze behind one of the long tables that line the buttery. What follows has got to be my favourite part of this day - or maybe week: The thing you have to know about my tsarina is that while she may not look the part, she is quite the little glutton. I’m not sure if her father kept here off sweets deliberately, or maybe their cook was just a complete waste of space – in any case Irina devours sweet rolls and pies with the fervour of a starved squirrel in midwinter. It’s really quite something. Sometimes I order the palace kitchen to send up a plate of honey cakes during council meetings just to see it happen. I always tell Irina that I do it to distract and make her look just a little less competent than she is, but the truth is that I just love to see the look of helpless pleasure on her face when she takes the first bite.

The nuns bring out large platters with pączkis that are generously covered in sugar crystals and still warm from the oven. They come to our table first before moving on to the others. Irina and I are polite adults of course, which means that we wait until each orphan has grabbed a pączki – or maybe smuggled an additional piece under the table: in any case there is only one left when it’s our turn. I snatch it as quickly as I can.

For the tiniest moment, Irina’s polite mask slips. She looks a bit betrayed and very furious indeed, and I cannot help but laugh.

“Odd,” she says with a stilted voice. “I could have sworn the tsar doesn't even like sweet things.”

“True, my darling.” I smile at her and waft the pączki through the air so that it’s filled with the smell of warm yeasty dough and caramelized sugar. “I can see that you’re dying to relieve me of my burden.”

I break off a piece of the pączki and hold it out. It’s a spur-of-the-moment impulse, and at first it’s just this stupid joke, but then Irina’s gaze meets mine and something shifts. She worries her lower lip and stares at me, angry and tempted, self-conscious and a little shamed, filling my head with ideas that are delicious and completely inappropriate for this setting. I want her to look at me like this when it’s just her and me, when she’s wearing Longinian jewellery for me and I can deny her, and please her, and be the hinge on which her whole world turns.

She looks a little wild, eyes wide and cheeks stung with colour, and then she’s leaning in and I’m so startled I nearly drop the pączki before she can take the first bite.

It’s glorious to have her like this. Irina is proud, imperious in her own quiet way, and for some reason she almost seems to be more so now as she bends her head to take morsels from my hand. We’re surrounded by strangers and there are definitely more romantic sounds in the world than the noise of a horde of children gobbling down pączkis, but all of this falls away, because I’m spellbound by her, by the intimacy of this act.

This close, I can see the dusting of cinnamon-coloured freckles on her cheeks and forehead. I can feel her breath ghosting against my fingertips. The tips of her hair brush against my thigh, which I should hardly be able to feel through the deerskin leather, but I do, I really do.

I break off the next piece, and then the next – and I’m pathetically afraid that any moment now she’ll say that she’s had enough, that this is ridiculous and we should stop. But she doesn’t. There’s a little pause each time I offer her a new morsel, like she’s internally struggling with what she’s letting me do to her: so there is resistance and then acquiescence, and the moment in which one tips into the other is the hottest thing that has ever happened to me. It makes me feel powerful and greedy – and vulnerable too because I want this, I want her, so much that I can hardly breathe.

She takes her time over the last piece, savouring the taste and pausing in between bites. And then suddenly there is nothing left, this is over, and I know that I ought to take my hand back, which I’m still extending to her like an idiot; know that I ought to break the tension by saying something suave and light-hearted.

But I’m still me, and my brain isn’t the most reliable of my assets at the best of times, so what comes out instead is: “Bet you have a crick in your neck by now. You must have hated this.” My voice sounds hoarse and a bit uncertain, and I’m stunned by my own idiocy: by my abject ability to ruin this precious, unexpected thing between us with just a couple of foolish words.

Irina doesn’t respond. Instead she bends her head once more, leans in, a bit wary and a bit trusting, and touches her lips to my fingertips, using her tongue to chase a few errant sugar crystals over my skin. It only lasts for the briefest of moments, but I’ve already been pushed to the brink by her closeness, by her yielding, and I make a low, needy sound for her.

I can feel the movement of her lips against my skin as she whispers. “It was perfect.” She gazes up at me and smiles a little, body still almost curled into mine. “Do you think they saw it?”

“Saw what? Who? What?”

Irina nuzzles her cheek against the back of my hand. “The nuns. Wasn’t that the whole purpose of what we just did?” She doesn’t look at me, which is for the best, because I don’t think I can control my face just now. At first, I’m just furious, blindingly furious that she’d turn something true between us, something so real that I’m not sure I’ll recover from it, into a lie. But then, as I’m slowly coming back to my senses, all the rage drains out of me and what remains is just a dull feeling of loss and the recognition that this unexpected, rapturous symmetry between what I want and what she wants was never there to begin with, just a mirage cooked up by my stupid, lust-addled brain. 

I excuse myself stiffly, pretending that I’ve just remembered something important that I need to discuss with Nievsky. I can feel Irina’s eyes on me as I walk through the buttery, and all through my pointless conversation with Nievsky and the captain of my guard, but I don’t turn back to her, not even once.

Afterwards, when I’m at a bit of a loss as to how to keep myself busy next, I run into the small girl with the strange, madder blue eyes again. She has traces of sugar smeared over her chin, and she’s still clutching the small stick she used earlier to draw monsters.

“The big black stallion in the courtyard,” she says, “is it yours?”

I nod.

“What’s his name?”

“Valour.”

“The others say he bites. Does he?” 

“Only children he doesn’t like.”

“Oh.” She drops her stick.

I pick it up and pass it back. “I don’t think Valour will bite you. Would you like to go and meet him?”

That’s how I end up trooping back into the courtyard with her. For a moment, making sure that Valour is on his best behaviour and putting her in the saddle makes me feel a little better about myself. I can sense that the girl likes me, trusts me even.

“How long have you been here?” I ask her.

“I don’t know. A while.” She’s leaning forward in the saddle now to braid wisps of Valour’s mane. I don’t think he’d approve, but fortunately he’s a horse and not an owl, so he can’t swivel his head around to monitor her tiny hands. “Since mother died.”

“Was she sick for a long time, your mother?”

“On no. She was never sick. She was really strong! She could lift a whole ham – she showed me once. She worked in the palace kitchen, you know.”

I stare into her blue, blue eyes – eyes that I’ve seen before, winking at me, flirting, bright with laughter, and then, later, flashed with terror and pain.

My stomach seizes up and I retch, then vomit, right there in front of my guards and the girl and my very startled horse. It’s gross, and the taste is acidic and when it’s over I stare at the ground and see disgusting fluids leak into what is left of the blurred outlines of the monsters I drew in the sand earlier.

This is who I am, who I’ll always be. I’ve been beyond foolish to think that Irina could ever want me. She’s seen me possessed by Chernobog, knows what I’ve done. But that’s not even the worst of it. The worst of it is that _I_ know what I’ve done, I remember all of it, and I don’t know how to live with myself.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello there again! Sorry, this is not a new chapter but a public service announcement: from 25 November onward, access to this fic will be limited to people with an AO3 account only! I'm not happy about this at all because it seems that many of you are reading this as guests. And I truly hate the idea of not being able to share this with some of you, or of not getting to chat to some of you in the comments! But for reasons I can't go into here it's this or stop writing the thing altogether. So, I just want to say thank you SO MUCH for reading and commenting and cheering me on for the last couple of months! I hope to see some of you on the other side!

Argh, I really hate this.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for being so patient with me, lovelies! The new chapter is a long one and it's taken me a while to find the right tone for it (well, I hope I found it in the end - but I guess you'll be the judge of that). I'm so happy that people are still reading this fic despite my epic slowness in updating! Merry Christmas to those of you who are celebrating!

Gusts of wind stir up the heavy clouds the moment our carriage exits the palace gate. A moment later an unseasonable downpour drums on the carriage roof and washes the gay colours out of the burgher houses that we pass on our way to the theatre. The world turns slate grey and I’m shivering in my low-necked gown. My maid bribed the Bogurovsky Theatre’s costume maker to find out what kinds of dresses the actress playing Tamerlane’s mistress will be wearing tonight, and then we chose a gown for me that matches the design. The gown is gorgeous, but it’s nothing I’d have picked myself. The fully beaded, cream-coloured bodice leaves my shoulders bare and hugs me so tightly that every breath intensifies the feeling of sharp restriction, while the skirt flares out in a riot of feather-light layers of embroidered tulle.

“Here.” Mirnatius, who sits as far away from me as is possible in the fairly confined space of the carriage, leans forward suddenly and drops a velveteen pouch into my lap. We’re back on this edge of prickly awkwardness and mutual distrust. And it’s me, my glibness at the orphanage, who’s taken us there. I had hated the humiliation of being forced to take morsels from his hand. Had hated it – and had been seduced by it all the same, utterly seduced by this strange, thorny pleasure of bending my will to his.

I turn the pouch upside down and catch the exquisitely fashioned pieces of Longinian jewellery in my hand. They are breathtaking, glowing softly as if lit from inside, and warming to my touch almost immediately. They twist into elegant shapes and curves and seem to speak their own alluring, ruby- and pearl-studded language. I trace the outer rim of an upper arm cuff bracelet with trailing pearls – and flinch when the silver, sharp as a knife, draws a small drop of blood from my fingertip.

 Mirnatius laughs mirthlessly. “I hope you like your pleasure laced with a little cruelty. If you toy with them, they’ll have their revenge.”

“Will you…” I lift the hand that holds the jewellery. “Will you help me put them on?”

“I’m sure you can manage. I haven’t selected anything that… requires skill.”

I do manage, but I cut myself again, and none of it feels right. If we were doing this properly – at least that’s what I’ve gathered from my reading – he would offer the pieces to me one by one, slip the cuff bracelets up my bare arms, and hook the choker around my neck.

I turn to him when I’m done. “Does it… How do I look?”

“Like you always do. A plain girl hiding behind a bunch of extravagant jewellery.”

We go through the motions as we enter the royal box in the theatre, but it’s a painful charade. Mirnatius guides me to the railing of the balcony and stands closely behind me. His body isn’t touching mine, but from the stalls and galleries it must be looking like I’m nestled against him. He bends his head and I can feel his breath brushing against the sensitive skin of my neck as he pretends to murmur sweet nothings into my ear. People are turning in their seats. The whole theatre, hundreds of people, are staring at us hungrily.

“So tell me”, Mirnatius whispers and strokes two fingers down my shoulder and upper arm, lingering over the cuff, “am I living up to your script? No need to overdo your part, by the way. I doubt that anyone in the auditorium can see the goose bumps racing up your skin.”

I take his offending hand and thread his fingers with mine before bringing our entwined hands to my mouth. I press a kiss to his knuckles, and then, right before letting go, let him feel the sharp edge of my teeth.

He hisses into my ear.

“Don’t provoke me,” I whisper.

He’s silent for a moment. “But I like you provoked.” His voice is different now: less cold, somehow, and also less assured. Each word slips into my ear like a threat – or a promise. “And I also like the fact that you’re on display for the whole city to see. You see, should I feel inclined to provoke you tonight…” His thumb and forefinger stray to the choker around my neck. They caress one of the pearls for a moment, before inching to the back of my neck. “Should I indeed feel so inclined…” Mirnatius gently slips his thumb underneath the choker so that the pearls tighten around my neck, “you’d be entirely at my disposal.”

The feeling inside me is so thunderous that there’s a moment in which I can’t tell it apart from the wild rhythm of the stomping feet beneath us and in the galleries all around us. I swallow against the merciless press of the pearls. “I’d be furious.”

“Oh, I know.” I wish I could see his face. But I love the sound of his quiet laughter in my ear – intimate, and a little cruel, and sounding just as helplessly enthralled as I feel. “I think you’d fight it at first. You’d be appalled, then frantic. But in the end, I think, you’d give in. And you’d let me…”

There is a brash knock behind us and Mirnatius takes a rapid step back. We turn, and I’m not sure what Nievsky and my father read in our faces, but they seem to hate it even more than they hate each other. In any case, they stop to exchange a look of poignant, shared bewilderment before they bump shoulders in their attempt to get ahead of the other in stepping through the door.

“There is no need…” I start, but my father cuts me off almost immediately.

“My friend Nievsky couldn’t wait to follow the tsar’s request to join you in the royal box, which made me realize that my daughter, too, must long for company.”

“Go away, Nievsky,” Mirnatius says. “I didn’t request anyone’s company.”

“Don’t be silly, my boy.” Nievsky steps to the railing and starts exchanging absurdly pompous hand-signals with individual guards stationed in different parts of the theatre. “You’re fully exposed up here. The theatre could be crawling with assassins or _flamers_. I have to be right beside you to ensure your safety.”

“I don’t want…” Mirnatius’s voice is drowned out by the trumpets signalling the beginning of the play.

“There we go,” Nievsky says. “Don’t make a fuss now. The people don’t want to see their tsar in a heated exchange with his highly decorated spymaster. It would probably remind them of the many public altercations between said spymaster and the tsar’s disgraced mother – and everyone knows how this story ended. 

Mirnatius isn’t braced for Nievsky’s brutal nonchalance. His body goes rigid next to mine, but he doesn’t speak again and I want to throttle Nievsky slowly and painfully.

The next hour is as excruciating as it is surreal. Reading a play in manuscript and watching it unfold on stage turn out to be two very different things. I’m not a fool – I never expected the performance to be tame – in fact, I’ve counted on it to be distractingly scandalous so a to draw attention away from the play’s explosive political content. It’s just that apparently I haven’t given enough thought to what “scandalous” might look like in practice.

At the beginning of the play, the girl who will later become Tamerlane’s mistress is introduced as a Longinian female assassin, hell-bent on taking the tsar’s life. She is overpowered and spends the First Act kneeling naked at Tamerlane’s feet, chained to his throne. In Act Two, Tamerlane grows bored with this spectacle and starts adorning the girl’s supple body with a set of Longinian jewellery that casts intriguing shadows across her skin. Much to his surprise, Tamerlane realizes that now that the girl is wearing jewellery for him, he can tap into her sense perceptions and feel what she feels. There is a riotous scene in which Tamerlane briefly – and comically – experiments with having the girl (and, by extension, himself) tortured. He subsequently decides to turn the girl’s body into a finely-tuned instrument of pleasure – and this Act passes with Tamerlane sprawled on his throne, luxuriating in the rarest of wanton sensations while directing the girl to engage in increasingly depraved acts.

Act Three brings a badly scripted Russian invasion and foregrounds Tamerlane’s cruelty against his people. But I don’t think anyone notices because at this point, Tamerlane has fallen in love with the girl. The play is silent on her feelings, but when Tamerlane demands that she do all the debauched things that she’s previously done _for_ him _with_ him instead, she yields with grace.

The crowd in the theatre turns raucous. Some of the people in the stalls come close to twirling on their heels like human spinning tops, following the events on stage with open mouths in one moment and ogling my Longinian jewellery in the next, rinse and repeat. I try to tell myself that this is exactly what I was hoping for – my little scheme coming to fruition beautifully. For our audience, my father’s and Nievsky’s presence in our box probably adds delicious frisson to the scene. I cling to this idea and try not to pay attention to the jerky movements of my father’s hands. His revulsion is palpable, and for once he and Nievsky seem to see eye to eye about Mirnatius and me. Indeed, at one point Nievsky – whose skin has taken on an ashen colour, making him look more than ever like a resentful toad – resolutely turns his back to the stage and offers my father his views on the new salt tax like an olive branch. My father latches onto the topic with relief and factual pettiness.

They become wrapped up in each others’ clashing views quickly, and for the first time in what feels like an eternity, I allow myself to breathe.

Besides me, Mirnatius snickers. “So this wasn’t part of your plan?”

“Of course not. I w…” The words won’t come. I’m too thrown by the fact that what is happening on stage right now seems to clear up all the lingering questions I’ve had about the marital bed since Magreta’s longwinded, nebulous account of what’s _not_ supposed to happen before marriage all these years ago.

Tamerlane’s bed on stage is shrouded in thin curtains, but thanks to an ingenious trick with the light the outlines of the actors’ bodies are starkly visible against the cloth. The girl kneels on the bed before Tamerlane forces her on her hands and knees. I should have been able to guess – after all, I’ve seen how a stallion takes a mare – but this realization doesn’t sooth the sting of disappointment. I'm not sure what I imagined, but this seems cold and impersonal, and I don't think that I would like it.

I cast a quick glance at Mirnatius and realize that he’s been watching me out of the corner of his eye. He steps behind me and brings his mouth to my ear. “Still eager for me to visit your bedchamber?”

“Is this really… how it’s done?”

It’s not what he expects. I can feel his surprise, but he doesn’t laugh at me. Instead, he draws me a little closer and rests his chin on my shoulder. I know that this is all part of the performance we're putting on for our audience, but that's not how it feels to be close to him in this moment.

“There are many ways,” he murmurs. “You can face the other person, and it doesn’t have to be the man who’s on top or directing the movement. I think… most people take a lot of pleasure in finding out what they like best.” 

My heart knocks against my breastbone once, twice, and my cheeks are ablaze with heat from the impropriety of having a conversation about these matters. I feel stripped bare, my embarrassment humiliatingly exposed for him. Part of me recoils from letting him gauge the depth of my ignorance, from letting him have the upper hand. But underneath this wild whirl of sensations unfurls another feeling – the seed of a feeling I don’t recognize but want to claim for myself and hold on to: something warm and tender and trusting that takes root in this moment in which he sees me vulnerable and knows not to push but to make me feel safe instead. 

I allow my shoulders to relax, my back to rest more comfortably against his body. Then I tip my head back minutely and whisper: “What do you like best?”

“I?” He seems taken aback. “Uhm. I guess I…” I can hear the embarrassment in his voice, but then he gives me his truth in return for mine. “I guess I don’t know. Chernobog preferred it with me flat on my back while the other person took their pleasure from my body. I know that I wouldn’t ever want to do that again.”

I nod, touching his cheek with my own for the fraction of a second. Suddenly, all around us and down below in the stalls, people are clapping and stomping, shouting too. Apparently we’ve reached the intermission. I’m not ready to step away from Mirnatius, from slipping the mask back on, but courtiers and dignitaries are already streaming into our box.

The smug look on Nievsky’s face should have given me warning, but it’s only when the Habsburgian ambassador steps forward, bowing so deeply that I’m afraid he’ll pitch himself head-first into my gown, that I realize what is about to happen.

“Imperial Highnesses, it is my greatest pleasure,” he drones with his heavily accented voice, “to present to you Princess Elisabeth Anna of Habsburg-Lorraine, the youngest and most beloved daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Theresia.”

Our courtiers move as one, parting like a flock of well-trained geese to make room for Elisabeth, who looks lovely and radiant, like she’s stepped out of a freshly varnished painting. She approaches us with a dainty step and downcast eyes, and it’s only when she sinks into a deep curtsy that the brilliant choreography of her entrance is fully revealed. Curtsying still, she turns her face up towards Mirnatius and raises her eyes to him, revealing the most extraordinary pair of light blue eyes rimmed with golden lashes.

Her rare beauty matches his, and it’s plain for everyone to see that the brilliant sheen of her eyes, her slightly parted lips, aren’t part of the performance but born out of eagerness and real desire. “I have dreamed that our paths would cross, Imperial Highness.”

 

*

 

Mirnatius keeps his promise. I didn’t think he would – not after spending the second half of the play in lively conversation with Elisabeth who, it turns out, is a skilled horsewoman, loves the hunt, and seems to have visited every _Wunderkammer_ and private collection of paintings between the Danube and the Rhein. She is intelligent and charming, and so comfortable in her own skin that it makes me tongue-tied and awkward.

I’m almost surprised, therefore, when one of my guards announces Mirnatius’s arrival. My maids have helped me to take off the Longinian jewellery, but they have only just started to peel me out of the many-layered robe and tightly laced stays.

There is no time to do this now, because Mirnatius is already leaning in the door, gazing at me lazily. His presence turns my maid into a frenzied, giggling whirl – there are hands tugging my limbs this way and that, one of them dabs perfume behind my ears and onto my pulse points, and another girl’s energetic use of a powder puff – “you’re blushing, tsarina!” – makes me sneeze. And then, before I have time to collect myself, the girls rush away, trailing ribbons and bearing away in their arms parts of my skirt like clouds of tulle.

When I turn to the mirror, the girl who meets me eyes looks both like and nothing like me. The powder can’t hide the colour in my cheeks, and I wish there’d been time to take down and brush my hair.

There is little inflection in Mirnatius’s voice: “Pleased with your reflection?”

I turn around. “My only ambition,” I say loud enough for the two guards on the other side of the open door to hear, “is to please my husband.”

“Is that so?” Mirnatius closes the door, then strolls over and stops next to the dressing table on which the pieces of Longinian jewellery are laid out. He is still wearing the formal clothes he wore at the theatre. My sense of palace protocol is still a little hazy, but I think usually husbands show up in dressing gowns for these occasions. So maybe the formal wear is a sign that Mirnatius is planning to leave right away through the secret door. It’s almost a relief. Almost. 

“Is Princess Elisabeth satisfied with her rooms?” I ask.

“I believe so. She’s brought along two of her hunting dogs. Beautiful animals. I’m not sure the carpet will survive but she wouldn’t be parted from them.”

“I see. You should ride with her tomorrow morning, show her your pens of hunting dogs.”

Mirnatius nods slowly. “I intend to. But I’m not here to ask your permission.”

“You don’t need it. Why are you here, then?”

“To test a theory.” Mirnatius’s fingers tap a slow rhythm against the softly gleaming surface of the table. Then they stray to the choker and start playing with the pearls. And I know that nothing has happened yet, and whatever I am experiencing is merely an effect of his presence and the tension in the room, but it feels like his fingers are slowly caressing my neck.

“Did you mean it just now?” he asks quietly. “That you want to please me?”

My pulse quickens and I can feel this soft, sweet thrumming everywhere – behind my temples, under the soft skin on the side of my neck, in my fingertips. I didn’t know this about myself until today – until this strange, irresistible moment in the buttery of the orphanage. “I don’t know. Maybe. We… We could find out.”

His voice is a little hoarse when he says “I’d like that.”

He doesn’t speak, doesn’t move after that and I’m far out at sea, uncertain what he wants or expects. “What… how…?” I hadn’t expected that this would require words, and I’m not sure that I can give him the right ones.

“Will you take off the dress?” he asks.

“I don’t think I can open the laces at the back of the bodice.”

“The skirt and everything underneath then.”

My fingers fumble on the tiny buttons that fasten the skirt to the tightly-laced bodice. And then, when I’ve finally opened all of them, I find that I am not ready to step out of the skirt and my undergarments. I wish that he would do it for me, decide what’s the right moment. He doesn’t – he remains where he is, next to the dressing table. But his eyes never stray from me. I draw in a shuddering breath, and that’s when he says: “I like it when you … struggle.” He smiles a little, and it’s nothing like the practiced smiles he uses in court. It crinkles the skin around his eyes and makes his face look softer, younger for a moment. “And I don’t mind waiting for you.”

I can’t bring myself to meet his eyes when I finally allow the layers of tulle and silk and linen to slide down my body, but he’s relentless. “Look at me.”

I lift my head. Shiver under his gaze. I love the way he looks at me. I think it’s this game that he is hot for and not necessarily me, but the hunger and possessiveness in his eyes are real.

He crooks a finger, beckoning me towards him and I slowly move across the room. With the exception of taking baths, I have never been naked or half-naked in this room for more than a moment, and it feels strangely transgressive to be so now. It unsettles me and thrills me and makes me somehow more attuned to him – makes me feel like I am his.

When I’m standing in front of him, he strokes a finger across the upper rim of the bodice, but instead of reaching for the laces, he gestures to the jewellery on the table. “Will you wear these adornments for me?”

The moment feels strangely solemn. “I will.”

His fingers don’t linger, but they brush gently against my skin when he fastens the choker around my neck. He takes his time sliding each of the bracelets up my left arm, then my right arm. When he’s done, his hand disappears in his pocket and returns with two delicate chains. He tips up my chin and feeds each of the chains through a tiny eyelet half hidden behind the pearls at the front of the choker. Then he fastens the other end of the chains to the lowest bracelet on each arm. The chains hardly restrict my movement, but I feel bound nevertheless. The cool links of the chains dance across my skin and I have to bite my lip and swallow the sound that nearly escapes me.

Mirnatius takes something else from his coat. I can’t make out what kind of jewellery it is until he crouches down before me and puts my foot on his knee in order to fasten an elongated cuff around my left thigh. It’s fashioned out of silver vines, studded with pearls. The longest vine curls up to my hip and the lowest reaches down to my knee. The silver presses cool against the tender, smooth skin of my inner thigh and although I know it can’t be, it feels like the vines are pulsing softly, echoing the wild rhythm of the blood rushing through my veins.

Mirnatius gets up, looking a little breathless himself. “Come.” He doesn’t touch me as he guides me to the small alcove where I write my letters.

By day, the stained glass windows make this the brightest spot in my room. He puts a hand on my writing table. “Up you go.”

“W-what?”

“You’ve heard me.”

“The people in the courtyard will see me!”

“They won’t. These windows are more lead than glass by now. They might see a shadow, but I doubt it.”

“But I’ll be so …exposed.” My mind is struggling with this idea, but my body… doesn’t seem to share this sentiment. Instead, there is this sweet, insistent pressure low in my belly that grows and grows.

I think Mirnatius can feel it too, because he looks wolfishly pleased. “That’s what I want, and so you will do it.”

He tugs cushions under each of my knees before stepping back. And so I kneel on the table where I deal with all my correspondence and papers, naked from the waist, humiliated, and more aroused than I’ve ever been.

“Right. Loosen your hair.”

I can see desire flare in his eyes as I stretch my arms upwards, as far as the chains allow, and take the pins from my hair until it flows across my shoulders and down my back.

“I want to watch you again. Will you do this for me?” 

I swallow. Picture it, appalled and helplessly inflamed. Then nod. 

“Good.” Mirnatius looks a little dazed. He turns and starts walking to the tapestry that covers my wall.

He freezes when I say: “No.”

“No?”

“If I do this for you,” I say, “I need you to be here with me. You don’t have to touch me and you don’t have to be involved. But I need to see you. I need to know for whom I’m doing this.”

It takes him a long moment, but then he turns. Smiles a little crookedly. “I suppose that’s fair.”

It’s achingly intimate and so much more intense than it’s ever been in the past. Mirnatius’s eyes are hooded and I can see how much what I do affects him, but he keeps his arms tightly folded across his chest and stands five steps away from me. After a while, he starts talking to me though – asking me what it feels like; describing the intensities and sensations that the jewellery mediates; telling me what to do and then, maddeningly and increasingly, when to stop.

“Not yet,” he says sternly.

“But I need, I want to… I… can’t… please won’t you let me…” I hardly recognize my own voice, wrecked with lust and yearning.

“No. Put your hands behind your back.” 

“That’s cruel.” It comes out as a whine. My thighs are trembling with exhaustion and frustrated desire. “I want something in return.”

“What is it that you want?”

“Come closer.”

“Do what I’m asking and I will.”

I’m teetering on the edge, panting and knowing that the feeling that I’ve been chasing is so close, finally so, so close, but I obey his command and put my hands where he wants them.

He comes closer, and closer still, stopping just an arm's length away. His eyes are wide and dark, and he looks as lost to this as I feel. His beautiful, strong hands are trembling slightly and I wish he’d touch me – touch me in the most innocent or depraved way, I don’t care how. I just know that this wanting is swallowing me whole, rending my body apart with frustrated desire.

Mirnatius can sense it and arousal blazes hotly in this eyes. “Touch yourself again,” he says. “But you don't get to bring yourself off until I tell you so.”

“No… Mirnatius. I can’t. I can’t…”

“Do it.”

I do what he asks, unable to suppress the needy sounds that are dropping from my lips and finally reaching, reaching…

“Stop.”

This time, I’m close to crying. “You’re evil.”

“Indeed I am. And you love it.” He steps a little closer. “You should see yourself, squirrel. You look entirely debauched. Desperate and at my mercy.”

I bring my right hand to the front of body and watch him grow restless. “Don’t you dare. I haven’t said that you can do this yet.”

“I know.” I stretch out my hand slowly so as not to spook him, reach for his face and let my thumb caress his full lower lip. His eyes turn darker still. “But here is the thing, Mirnatius: you’re at my mercy too. You’re…“

He stops me by opening his lips for me, touching his tongue to my skin, tasting me – and ignites me like a hundred candles flaring up at once. I’m not touching myself, but I slip over this bright, sharp edge nevertheless and for a moment there is only pleasure, blindingly intense pleasure. 

When I open my eyes again, still panting, Mirnatius looks both fiercely turned on and indignant. “I told you not to,” he says.

“It was partly your fault,” I point out weakly.

“You don’t get to sweet-talk yourself out of this, squirrel. Do it again.”

“What? I’m wrung out – it’s never been like this. I don’t think I can. I – “

Mirnatius puts his hands on my thighs and gently spreads them a little wider. He turns his face up to me and although I’m exhausted beyond measure, something in me thrills to the cruelty and tenderness in his eyes. “I’m waiting.”

He ends up waiting for a long time because exhaustion and the intensity of what we did before means that my body is slow to kindle once more. But he doesn’t seem to mind – he keeps talking to me, lavishing praise on me, staying close to me so that once in a while he can fondle the silver vines of the cuff or the pearls dangling from my choker.

When he finally says “ _Now_ ” I come within a heartbeat, and then nearly collapse with exhaustion. But Mirnatius is there to catch me. He carries me to my bed, unlaces the bodice, and helps me take off the jewellery. He brings me water and tries to shake out the cushions for me, but I’m already burrowing into them, tired beyond belief and hoping that if I allow my mind to slip into sleep right away, I’ll get a reprieve from thinking about what happened tonight until tomorrow. 

Mirnatius hovers by the foot of my bed. I can’t bring myself to meet his eyes, now that I’m no longer floating in a delirium of lust and desire. “Are you alright?” he asks haltingly. “Was this…?”

“Of course it was.” It’s the truth – I was more than alright with what we did, I just don’t know what it means and how I am supposed to face him – or myself – after what I did for him tonight.

He hesitates. Then says: “I’ll be back by first light.”

“Good,” I mumble into my cushion. “Don’t be late.”

“I promise I won’t.”


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! I hope 2019 has been treating everyone well so far! Here's a new chapter involving a conflagration, oxen, Nour crossing paths with Vassilia, and the plot leaping forward. Thanks so much for reading!

Vassilia shuts the door behind us and leans against it heavily. To keep the world out, perhaps, or to keep her options open for a quick escape.

It was Orel’s father who led us into this small, ill-ventilated guest chamber at the back of the house. He didn't like it – that much was clear from the pinched look on his face. Didn’t like the idea of harbouring under his roof the deranged stranger who’d doused himself in lamp oil in the midst of a family dinner. But the imperative of hospitality – or more likely fear of the tsar’s displeasure – quickly overruled this sentiment. You don’t cast two aristocrats into the streets at night if you’re a Jew and planning to live to the end of the week.

There isn’t much room in the chamber for anything beside a bed, a chest of drawers and a rickety nightstand. The only light comes from two tallow candles on the windowsill. I turn my back to them and sit down on the bed, hard.

“So,” Vassilia says.

I rub at a spot of half-dried oil close to my temple. “Why are you here?”

“It’s my right to be with my husband.”

“Technically no, it isn’t. It is my duty to provide for you and to protect you, but there is no obligation for us to live together, or even to spend substantial amounts of time in each other’s presence.”

It’s impossible to read her face, and I am so tired. “Vassilia, you don’t even like me. What are you doing here?” It’s a madcap thing – a highborn woman undergoing the travails of coach-travel while pregnant, entering the house of outcast strangers in pursuit of her husband. Vassilia should be lounging in her rooms at court, nibbling sweetmeats and pestering her servants. But she’s neither a romantic nor a fool. If she’s here, she’s here for a reason. “Tell me.”

“Later I might. Why don’t you tell _me_ if you were actually planning to set yourself on fire, earlier?”

“I suppose I was.” I stare at my palms, unremarkable and familiar, and can’t shake this nauseous feeling of wrongness. It’s a relief to talk about it, even if the person listening is my wife. “Only that I wasn’t myself. It felt like being in a nightmare – but… someone else’s nightmare, I think. I was in it and things happened to me – but I was another person.”

“Someone you know?" 

“I don’t know. I remember the woods at night. Strange trees, southern ones most likely. Pain and fear, and a sense that… that it would end soon, and that it would end with a knife. Bloody feet. Bloody skirts, too.”

“You were wearing skirts?” Vassilia rests her head against the doorframe, “you were what – a woman?”

I hadn’t thought about this before, but I remember now the slender, callused fingers that held the knife that carved the letter into the tree. The shape of small, narrow feet. “A girl, maybe?”

“I see,” says Vassilia. “Do you think you’re losing your mind?”

No. But then again I was about to kill myself not even an hour ago – would have, if Orel hadn’t stepped in. “I don’t know.”

She looks at me for a long moment. And then she’s kicking off her shoes. “I’m going to bed. You should sleep, too.”

We have never slept in the same bed. We have been in bed together a couple of times: that first time, for the consummation of the marriage; and then a few other times before Vassilia started to show. I’ve always left immediately after, shuffling back to my own bed shamed and relieved, my loneliness sharpened, not softened, by these arduous encounters.

Whoever built this bed wasn’t kindly inclined to future occupants taller than average. I have to curl myself around the cushion and bend my knees to an uncomfortable degree to fit. I turn my back to Vassilia and she does the same, lying on her side and facing away from me. Our backs aren’t touching, but the bed is so narrow that there is barely room between us.

“I dreamed of this as a girl,” Vassilia says.

I snort. “No you didn’t.”

“I dreamed of being warm in bed. I never was, you see - not after my sister died. We’d always shared a bed, but then she died of the sweating disease when I was eleven. After that… I just wasn’t used to sleeping alone. I think my body had never really learned to hold on to what little warmth there was without another person there to share it with.”

“What about the father of your child? I’m sure his bed was warm.”

The silence that follows my words seems to stretch and change its shape. I’ve never asked before. It’s always seemed pointless to inquire, like courting further humiliation when the facts, stark and unchangeable, are plain for everyone to see in Vassilia’s heavily pregnant shape.

“You're the father of my child.”

“In the eyes of the law, perhaps. Unless I –”

“Unless what? What?” I can hear Vassilia rapidly turning in bed, her usually bland voice suddenly intent, and I realize that while I still don’t like her much, I certainly don’t enjoy being the source of her fear. 

“I wouldn’t do that, contest the child’s legitimacy. But I have a right to know who fathered this cuckoo child of yours." 

“I’m not sure you do. But I’ll tell you this,” she adds quietly after a moment, “He’s a good man. When I first met him, I knew that he was the one I was destined to fall in love with. I had no doubts about that, no doubts at all.”

“Well, little did you know at that point that destiny is no match for Mirnatius’s machinations.”

Vassilia makes an impatient noise. “That wasn’t Mirnatius. Our match was all Irina’s doing. Mirnatius isn’t quite as hare-brained as people make him out to be, but he has no mind for strategy.”

“Really? You think it was her idea?”

“God, you’re hopeless!” Her laughter doesn’t sound condescending, just sad. “Still infatuated with him – and now what? Desperately grateful that he wasn’t the one who put the marital noose around your neck?”

She’s a little bit right and I can feel my face heat in the dark. “I don’t… think of you as a noose around my neck. I know that you weren’t given a choice either. It’s just that…” It’s hard to put into words: the loss of something that was never mine in the first place.

Vassilia sighs. “I know. But I’d still like to be warm.” She pushes her cold feet against my calves. “Alright?”

“Alright.”

 

***

 

I wake to Vassila’s gentle snoring. It’s pitch-dark in the small room but after a moment the flames that I’ve been dreaming about start licking at the edges of my vision. I shake my head and they vanish, only to be replaced by soft sounds that I cannot place: a twig snapped in two; the whisper-quiet crackling of dry wood devoured by flames.

I sit up, and that’s when I see the sliver of golden light underneath the door. There must be someone on the other side of the door. Someone who’s crept trough the sleeping house with a candle, someone whose steps have slowed, then stilled outside our chamber. Someone who is now waiting, silently.

I’m not nearly as patient. I get up, put on trousers and tunic, and open the door. There’s no one there, but I glimpse the shadow of a small figure, hallowed by the light of a candle, disappearing at the end of the corridor. It happens when I move to follow the shadow: I am thrown off balance, knocked shoulder-first into the wall. It’s the injured shoulder: pain radiates out, down my back and into my arm, and I’m breathless with it for a moment. Maybe it’s the shock, but my ears are filled once more with the sound of hungry flames devouring wood, louder this time.

When I pull myself back up and turn around, the corridor – lit by ash-coloured moonlight – is empty. And yet someone seems to be laughing quietly, and then cold fingers stroke against my cheek – once, twice, before a fist hits me so hard that my head snaps to the side and I crash into the wall once more.

“What is going on?” Vassila appears in the door to our chamber before I’ve managed to get up again. crouches down next to me, even as I wildly gesture to her to move back into the room.

“Go back inside! It’s not safe. There’s… something out here!”

Vassilia is holding a candle, and her fingers are moving my chin carefully this way and that. “Who did this?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see anyone. You should go back inside.” But it’s odd: I can feel that whatever it was that hurt me is retreating now, drifting away in the dark. “I think it’s gone for now, but something’s very wrong in this house. I should go and find Orel.”

“I’ll come with you.” Vassilia is already wearing her shawl. I reach out to take the candle from her, but she pulls it back: “I don’t think so. You can be in charge of brute force. I’ll deal with open flame devices.”

We move through the house as quietly as we can. I don’t see or hear anyone, but I can’t shake the sense that the house is awake – that the ancient beams and shadowy tapestries are holding their breath, waiting. The sinister crackling in my ears is getting louder, and I nearly stumble on the stairs because I can’t bear to look away from the flame of Vassilia’s candle.

She takes my hand and pinches me. “Pull yourself tog-” We’re both shocked into silence. The landing at the top of the stairs had been empty just a moment ago. It’s not empty now.

I’ve no idea where the light is coming from: it’s not moonlight but a far more sinister play of light and shadow that is dancing across Orel’s marble-white skin. He’s suspended in the air, naked and spinning slowly as if someone has tied him to an invisible Catherine wheel. Blood is streaking his face and flanks, running down his legs. His sightless eyes are wide with panic, and he keeps making these awful, low choking sounds as if someone is slowly crushing his windpipe.

Vassilia and I rush up the stairs and that’s when I notice her: she’s one of Orel’s cousins, I think – a small girl with a limp who can’t be much older than eight or nine. I remember seeing Basia chide her for sneaking crumbs to the housecat a few nights ago. The girl is crouching on the floor, clutching a book to her chest and slowly moving her forefinger in circles, keeping time with each terrible spin of Orel’s body – as if what’s happening to him is all her doing. But that’s not the worst of it: the worst of it is that she’s alight with flames: they are blistering her skin, eating into her flesh while she continues her strange humming, oblivious to the slow annihilation of her frame.

Vassilia looks like she is about to be sick, but her voice is steady. “Can we smother the flames with my shawl?”

“I doubt it.” I grab one of the heavy tapestries instead, but the girl starts snarling and hissing the moment I approach her. Suddenly, Vassilia is besides me. She tries to take the tapestry from me – and is knocked back by an invisible force so strong that she staggers back. I leap forward, but the girl is suddenly seven feet away from me, at the far end of the short gallery. She starts laughing, but the fire has eaten so far into her cheek that the charred flesh collapses with the movement, revealing a line of blackened teeth.

She touches her hand to one of the exposed beams and these preternatural flames tear up the old wood like no ordinary fire ever would. Behind me, Vassilia screams and Orel’s body is spinning faster now and all I know is that I can follow this girl, who is setting her own home ablaze, or try to save Orel, and it’s not a choice, not really. I’m already beside him, and I have no idea what I’m doing: I simply grab him by the shoulders and hold on – hold on as his skin turns to fire underneath my hands, as I’m thrown into the air, my limbs beaten into submission, and the very air starts to singe my body as I’m sucked into the same cruel whirl that propels Orel’s body until we’re both spinning and burning and burning and spinning – flames and pain all-consuming.

It takes me a long time to realize that someone is whispering to me. It isn’t Orel: it’s a girl’s voice, and her tone is accusatory and urgent but I cannot make out the meaning of her words, until her voice becomes louder, suddenly, and shrill. “ _You will do it, won’t you? I’ll hurt you more if you don’t. I’ll hurt him, too_.”

I don’t know what she wants from me, but I’m in no state to test the patience of my supernatural torturer. Speaking is difficult. I manage a nod.

“ _Do I have your word?_ ”

“Yes,” I wheeze, and then Orel and I are crashing to the floor in a tangle of bloody, bruised limbs.

When I open my eyes, there’s chaos all around us. People are screaming and running past us. It’s hard to breathe with the smoke growing denser every moment. Vassilia is pulling at my arm. I try to push up and flinch when my palm comes into contact with something that feels like blistered human skin. But what I’m touching isn’t skin – it’s the fire-eaten leather of the book that Orel’s cousin dropped before she shied away from me. It’s the collection of Janeczko’s elegies that I held in my hands earlier tonight in the _Mermaid_ , one of the books Orel didn’t want to leave behind.

“You have to get up or we’re going to die in here!” Vassilia’s voice is hoarse from the smoke. There’s some kind of crash on the floor above us and the roar of the flames is now almost deafening. “What’s wrong with Orel? Is he alive?”

Orel isn’t moving, but he’s not dead – I know this without a doubt because I’m still holding on to him, and there’s a pulse beneath my thumb when I find the carotid on the side of his neck.

I try to carry him, but the shoulder is no good and I stagger after a couple of steps. Vassilia curses and we end up dragging Orel between us, down the stairs, through the smoke and chaos, until we’re in the narrow lane.

Stepping into the fresh night air should be a relief, but we’re still enveloped by smoke. It’s a horrific sight: there’s been little rain for weeks now, and the wooden houses, crammed together so closely that their portly upper stories are almost touching across the lane, pass on the flames like a quickly spreading plague. My ears are ringing with the screams of men and women who are waking up in the midst of this conflagration, locked in by fire.

Between Vassilia and me, Orel is twitching and then he’s coming to consciousness. “What’s wrong?” he croaks.

“There’s a fire,” Vassilia says, voice so flat I almost don’t hear her. “I don’t think you were the one who started it. I know for a fact that it wasn’t Ilias.”

“But _they_ don’t know that,” is the last thing I manage to get out before a group of men I don’t recognize emerge fully from the smoke and a fist hits me so hard that I end up on my knees on the cobblestones. Orel’s filthy curses are quickly stopped when someone punches him in the stomach and shoves him to the ground.

“You’re a _flamer_ and he’s your accomplice and you will both die for this.”

“Sooner rather than later, I dare say,” Vassilia comments. She’s staring intently into the smoke. The ground has started to vibrate. “But I think that’s true for all of us. Look!”

It’s a herd of oxen, driven mad my fire and fear. They’re careening down the narrow alleyway, stomping hoofs and heaving bodies. A deadly bulwark that’s moving at breakneck speed.

We can’t outrun them, not with Orel. Vassilia and I stare at each other: our choice is between being trampled to death or heading back into one of the burning houses that line the street.

The ground beneath our feet becomes a vicious drum. The men who’ve confronted us wisely decide to make a run for it. My pulse spikes, and that’s when Vassilia and I grab Orel and rush into the smoke-drenched hell of the burning tannery to our right.

It’s like plunging headfirst into an inferno. The conflagration that’s sweeping through the alley has only just reached this house: half of the room we’re entering is in flames, and the smoke attacks our eyes and lungs right away. There are couple of vats sunk into the floor, used for soaking animal skins in a fetid concoction. I grab a couple of wet, stinking skins, and we wrap them around our bodies as best as we can before we make our way, coughing and wheezing, into the storerooms at the back of the house. 

The stink of burning leather is nauseating, and the backdoor is blocked by a tall, burning shelf that comes crushing down the moment we enter the room.

But there’s a narrow window not far from it. Vassilia throws open the wooden shutters, squeezes through and vanishes. The roar of the fire deafens all other sounds, so I’ve no idea what’s on the other side, but the first beams are crashing down behind us, so it’s not as if there is time to inquire. I help Orel through the window and push myself through immediately after – and then I’m falling, there’s a splash, and I’m suddenly submerged in stinking, putrid canal water.

It’s vile and Orel, who is paddling frantically right beside me, is making sounds like he’s half out of his mind with disgust. Vassilia utters an obscenity no well-bred lady should even know how to spell. And then there’s nothing left to do for us but to let us be carried downstream, away from the deadly blaze and the screams of the dying.

 

***

 

“You look like drowned river rats. Smell like them, too.” Nour folds her scar-covered arms across her chest and looks sorely tempted to evict us from the dingy premises of the _Mermaid._ “What the fuck Orel? And why are you wearing a tent?”

Orel isn’t wearing a tent. He’s wearing my tunic, because would you believe it, we didn’t have time to stop and grab a suit of his clothes what with the malevolent spirit-thing torturing him before burning down the Jewish quarter. That’s more or less what Orel tells Nour. “They think it was me who started the fire,” he adds quietly, and the words sound like it hurts him to push them out.

“It wasn’t him,” I add quickly. “We’ll tell them. We’ll … prove it somehow.”

“Of course,” Vassilia quips over the squelchy sound of her wringing out her wet braid, “this will be a perfectly easy thing to do.”

“Right.” Nour swivels on the heels of her boots to take a good look at Vassilia. “I don’t think anyone was talking to you. Who are you?”

“You’re in the presence of her Serenity, the Countess Orlov,” I grind out. “Show some respect.”

“Maybe when she’s not dripping quite so much.”

“We need dry clothes,” Orel says quickly. “And food. And then we need your river barge to take us south. I suppose we can’t operate it ourselves, so we might also need… well… We’ll need you. And a couple of your men.”

“Anything else you need? How about a castle and the crown jewels?”

“This isn’t a joke.” Orel lifts his head and while his sightless eyes cannot meet Nour’s gaze, he reaches for her. After a moment she clasps his outstretched hand. “There’s this thing – we don’t know what it is: a demon, maybe, or some kind of very, very pissed off spirit – that’s hounding me and Count Orlov. We haven’t had much time to discuss this, but we think that that’s what’s behind all the _flamer_ incidents. It’s not over, do you understand? We nearly died tonight. People… _my people_ are dying right now because this demon-spirit felt like teaching us a lesson. We have to stop it.”

“Stop it how?” Nour asks.

“Well… we’ve only just begun to figure this out,” I say. “But we both think that we need to go south to find clues to what it is that we’re facing. We’ve both had… well, something like visions –“

Nour snorts, but I push on: “We saw something, anyway: a forest, down south, and someone with a knife marking a tree.”

Nour looks at us like we’ve lost our minds, collectively and irrevocably. “Bloody Lady of Tears, you want to go south to find a tree?”

I nod. “Afraid so.”

I think it’s a testament to the strength of whatever bond exists between Nour and Orel that a few hours later, Vassilia, Orel and I are leaning with our elbows on the rail of Nour’s creaking river barge, watching the docks grow smaller and smaller, then vanish in the early morning mist. Even down here by the river, the breeze is laced with traces of smoke. The sun hasn’t even begun to peak over the hills in the east, but the sky over Montvilas is lit up nonetheless by the fire that is still ravaging the Jewish quarter.

Orel, who is usually such a fidgety, restless person, is perfectly still next to me. His arms are tightly wound around his body. I think of offering him the coat Nour handed me earlier, but decide against it because the last thing he needs is me making him feel like he’s weak or in need of charity. He’s neither, of course. He looks slight and young, but he’s the strongest person I’ve met in a long time. To have lost so much in the span of a few days and to push on nevertheless – it must take more bravery and sheer force of steely will than I could ever muster.

“ _So you’re honouring your promise_ ,” a female voice whispers.

“What?” I turn to Vassilia, but she is half asleep, leaning against my shoulder. “What did you say?”

“Nothing. Now let me sleep.” 

“ _That’s good_ ,” I hear the voice again as invisible, cold fingers lift my chin. “ _I wasn’t sure you would, you see. And so it seemed wise to spend a little time deciding whom I’d kill first: the woman, the baby, or the Jew. What are your thoughts on this matter?_ ”

Next to me, Vassilia is still dozing. Orel seems deeply buried in thought. There’s no sign that he has heard the sinister words.

“ _Oh, he can’t hear me right now_ ,” the voice points out helpfully. “ _He deserves some rest, don’t you think? It’s just you and me for now. And I’m pleased with you, Count Orlov. Very pleased."_

Pleased?

_"Why, yes. Follow the river. Go south. Find me.”_


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello lovelies! Sorry for the radio silence. I've spent the last couple of months writing, deleting and rewriting (rinse and repeat) the new chapter. Lots of frustrated staring-into-space and headdesking. Anyway, it's done now and I hope that you'll like it! :) Btw: Usually, I stick to one POV per chapter - this chapter is mostly Mirnatius's POV but there is also a clearly marked section in the middle told from Irina's POV. Also check out the note below for a historical tid-bit that I really love. Happy reading! And thanks for sticking with me!

Sleep won’t come. I’m lying on my bed, still thrilled half out of my mind, still fully dressed, – and, coming to think of it, I’m actually facing the wrong way, with my feet resting against the headboard. That was not a conscious decision. At least I don’t think it was? God, I have no idea what I’m doing. I can’t stop thinking about Irina. What she did. What she let me do. My mind is like some child’s kaleidoscope, filled with bright, sharp-edged fragments, every single one a memory of her, of us, and I keep running through them, terrified that a detail will slip away, that the fragments won’t click into place next time I return to a specific moment: my rational, restrained tsarina made incoherent by wanting; her wild pulse under my thumb when I slipped the bracelets on; the first, soft sound she made for me; her eyes glazed with fury and sweet, desperate abandonment; the mad rush of humiliation and mortified pleasure mediated through the jewellery when I denied her closure.

I hope that she’s sleeping soundly right now. I hope that she’s alright, at peace with herself. I wish there was a way for us to talk about what happened. No masks, no lies. I would tell her that if she feels raw and exposed by what we did that’s how I feel, too. I would tell her what the gift of her trust means to me. I would find the words to let her know that I see the strength in her desire to yield, to allow herself to be controlled in this one thing. I would have her know that there is nothing I wouldn’t do to keep her, this part of her, safe.

I’m up long before the first rosy sliver of sun peaks over the eastern mountains. My valet is up too, rumpled and confused as to why we’re reviewing my extensive collection of embroidered waistcoats by candlelight. I always dally when selecting my clothes for the day: mostly, because I enjoy the rare feeling of absolute confidence in my ability to make the correct decision. But this morning I’m not dressing to please myself: I want to be pleasing to her, and I’m not entirely sure what that entails. I have a terrible hunch that Irina might have a thing for a scholar’s shabby, drab frock. I won’t do drab, but I select an ensemble of waistcoat, overcoat and close-cut breeches in pearl-grey that is both understated and sophisticated.

When I’m fully dressed, the valet gazes at me with admiration, which is to be expected. What isn’t to be expected is his peering a little more closely, noting with ill suppressed surprise in his voice: “If I might be forgiven, Imperial Highness, but it seems that the application of a little powder might be warranted?”

I turn briskly to the mirror. I’ve never had to apply powder or anything else to my face. Over the years, Chernobog’s magic kept it all away, effacing the lines and imperfections that illness, accidents, sorrow, or sleepless nights might otherwise have given me. Not anymore, it seems. There are dark shadows shadows beneath my eyes and a small, barely scabbed over scratch close towards my hairline. There is hardly any colour in my cheeks and my lips are a little chapped. It’s… Well, it’s definitely bad news because I’ve never looked worse in my life. And I can’t have that – not today. Not when I’m about to see her. I doubt that Irina is drawn to me because of my impressively narrow reading or my rare skill at the hunt. I have very little to offer to someone like her, and if you take my looks off the table…

“Powder,” is what I say to the valet. “And while you’re at it, get some rose oil. And kohl for my eyes.”

It takes forever, because the valet is out of practice, but by the end of it I look like my old self again - better even. I still hate the man who gazes back at me from the mirror, but at least he’s once again meeting impeccable aesthetic standards.

It’s well past first light, and so I hurry through the secret passageway to Irina’s bedchamber, mentally cataloguing the lines that I’ve practiced and swallowing against the nervous lump in my throat.

She’s not in her bed. Not at her desk. Not on her balcony. Not in her boudoir. I even check behind the gorgeously painted screen – nothing.

_She’s not there._

I’m at a loss what to do. Perhaps she just nipped out to – I have no idea: commune with the squirrels? Sort out the bureaucratic farrago regarding the newest alteration of the salt tax?

In any case, she’s found something better to do with her time than seeing me. No doubt she’s already regretting last night. Regretting me.

The exhaustion of a sleepless night is finally making itself felt. I find myself at one of the stained-glass windows that had Irina endearingly worried last night. I want to allow my forehead to rest against the cool glass, but catch myself at the last moment, right before I stain the glass with smudges of powder.

 

***

 

I end up riding with the Habsburg princess. Elisabeth is an excellent horsewoman and, as it turns out, an excellent wrangler of monosyllabic royalty: she keeps up her seemingly effortless, charming prattle all through the morning, creating a conversational screen behind which I can hide without giving the gossips among my guards reason to speculate about my reticence.

Nievsky is waiting for me at the stables on our return. He hates the smell of horse dung but apparently that’s not the only reason for his sour mien. “Have you lost your mind?”, he hisses once I’ve taken my leave from Elisabeth. “The whole palace is aflutter with the news that you’ve lain with the tsarina!”

“I see.”

"Have you forgotten what we talked about? She will ruin you! As soon as you’ve got a royal heir on her, she will have you killed. She will use you for stud services and then she will spit you out!”

“Entirely possible. Nievsky, what’s this?”

Nievsky swivels around like a fat and very angry wasp ready to sting whoever is intruding. But what’s coming up behind us is not a person: it’s a hearse, drawn by two of our workhorses.

“This coffin, my dear boy,” Nievsky points out with malevolent satisfaction, “contains the sorry remains of the man whose bones they found in the drained mere. They were able to identify him by his boots. You might remember him? The missing footman. Strapping young lad. You took a bit of a shining to him once, if I remember correctly. They’re taking him to his family. Well, what’s left of him.”

“Thank you, Nievsky. You’re dismissed.”

Nievsky’s mouth falls open. “I’m not done!”

“Oh, but I am.” I signal my guards to mount their horses again, and then we’re riding out once more, flanking the hearse on both sides.

We’re soon riding through narrow, dirty streets that I’ve never set foot in before. People stop and stare because they recognise the tsar’s guard, but their gaze doesn’t linger on me because I’m wearing the coat and cowl of one of my guards, and keep my face mostly hidden. The stench – animal dung, human waste, and all things rotten – is overpowering. I have no idea how the people who live here can stand it: I come close to vomiting twice. We make slow progress because the street appears to be home to an implausible variety of farm animals. A group of pigs is frolicking in the drain channel that lines the street. A skinny donkey ambles from house to house. At one point, our horses shy because a flock of dramatically inclined geese start hissing all at once as we pass them.

Finally, we stop in front of a sorry hut with a thatched roof, set back a little from the street, with rickety shutters and a door whose paint is peeling and chipped. Two gaunt hens are standing guard.

There is something not quite right with the girl who opens the door. She’s my age, perhaps a bit older, but she squints at me and raises her hands to hide her face like a distrustful child. I push back my cowl. No reaction.

“We’re here to bring home the remains of the son of the house.” Still nothing. “I take it that’s your brother. My men are here to return his body.”

That produces a wailing sound shrill enough to wake the other inhabitant – an elderly woman with a limp who starts from a low stool before the hearth and shuffles warily to the door. Her bonnet is threadbare in places, and there are deep creases around her mouth. She performs an aborted curtsy and I repeat to her what I’ve already told the girl.

The woman nods curtly. “It’s been over a year. We knew that Aleksy wasn’t coming home no more. We are grateful to be able to bury his body. But why has my tsar come himself?”

“The tsar can do as he pleases.”

“There is nothing to please him here.” Expressed in a different tone, the words might have resembled an expression of humility. But her clipped voice makes them come out as a dismissal. I will not have that.

“Tell me about your grandson.”

“Son.” She gives me a sardonic look. “That’s grief for you, Imperial Highness. I take it you have little experience with it, but it can take a rather heinous toll on the complexion.”

My guards sneer at this. I send them outside to deal with unloading the hearse. When I turn around once more, the girl is kneeling on the dirt floor, tracing the black embroidery on the guard’s coat I’m wearing with her forefinger. I can sense that her mother is about to make this my fault, too. But before she has a chance to admonish me, the girl gets up, grabs my coat sleeve with both hands and pulls me to the single, rectangular window that admits a bit of light. There is a wooden box beneath the window. It’s heavy, apparently, because the girl grunts as she lifts it. She throws open the lid and then – and I have no idea if it’s intention or clumsiness – dumps the stones and pebbles contained inside onto my feet. I’m wearing soft riding boots and the impact of some of the larger stones hurts like hell. Colourful pebbles are rolling everywhere.

“Right.” I take the box from her and set it carefully to the ground. Move my toes experimentally and try not to wince.

“Aleksy”, is what the girl says.

“He… er… collected pebbles, your brother, didn’t he?”

I remember this now. Pressing him against the wall of a service corridor for a hurried kiss; the unexpected feel of something small and round in his pocket. His laughter and eagerness.

I crouch down and slowly start sorting the stones and pebbles back into the box. I’m doing it all wrong, apparently, because the girl keeps swatting my hand away and rearranges every pebble that I place inside the box. After a while, I resort to simply passing stones and pebbles to her, and that works better.

Aleksy’s mother watches us. “Why have you come to our house?” she asks again.

I look up from my crouching position on the floor. She’s standing with her back to the window so that her bonnet is lit up from behind while her face is in the shadows. One of her arms is raised a little, and she’s pointing her finger at me, waiting. She resembles, in posture and stillness, the pained angel observing the last judgement in the altarpiece of my palace chapel. But there is no redemption here.

“I knew your son. I liked him. I … failed him.” 

She nods. “You're the tsar. His life was yours to protect.”

“I know that.”

There is another long silence. Then she says quietly: “I find it harder every day to remember Aleksy’s face. I’ve always found them difficult to remember, faces. But now his is slipping away from me, too.”

“I see. Do you…” Well, of course she doesn’t own books or writing paper. I doubt that she can read. “Give me a moment”.

I dispatch one of my guards to find a printer’s shop and purchase black chalk and a blank broadside sheet. Once he’s back, I take these drawing materials inside only to realize that Aleksy’s family doesn't own a table. How can you live without a table? In any case, they seem to make do with their two stools and a couple of wooden boxes, which means that I end up kneeling on their dirt floor, which is not a position I had expected to find myself not once but twice in this house.

Aleksy’s mother and sister don’t move or talk while I draw, but they stare at the chalk in my hand like it’s an instrument of beguiling witchcraft. My portrait isn’t even a particularly good likeness – somehow the shape of Aleksy’s chin isn’t quite right and I’m not sure about the position of his dimples, but the girl makes excited hiccupping sounds and touches my hair very carefully while her mother cries without a sound.

She snatches the drawing away from me the moment I’m lifting the tip of the chalk from the paper. A little tear forms in the left corner where my knee was resting on the sheet.

“I wouldn’t take that from you,” I say, stung. “It’s yours. I wish I…”

She talks over me, still crying: “Please leave.” She presses the drawing to her chest, holds onto it so tightly I worry the chalk will smear.

“I could draw a better portrait for you, you know. I could…”

“No, your Imperial Highness. Please leave us.” She steps to the door. “I’ve given you my son. There is nothing for you here now.”

 

***

 

The ermine hurries soundlessly through the snow and as fresh snowflakes twine with my lashes and melt on my face, I wish – not for the first time – that I had my fur coat with me instead of this thin summer shawl. The ermine stops again, cocks her fine-boned head and sniffs the cold winter air.

I don’t know who sent the animal, or why. All I know is that I woke to the sharp pain of claws digging into my shoulder. At first, my room seemed pitch-dark but when I turned I saw the silvery, snow-covered woods waiting for me on the other side of the mirror. I could see then, too, the half-dried blood clumping together the ermine’s coat.

The Staryk forest is eerily quiet. It makes me think of Magreta, of being holed up with her in the small peasant’s hut deep in the wintry forest. I remember all of it: the smell of slightly burned porridge; Magreta’s knitting needles moving in the firelight. The way she softly clicked her tongue in the rare moments when she’d lost a stitch. The half-heard sound of her careful footsteps, padding over to my cot to draw the blanket over me. I had felt safe then. Limbs heavy with exhaustion, the frantic, fluttery feeling inside of me finally abetting. Safe in the knowledge that we had managed to outrun my husband and Chernobog another night.

And now Magreta is gone, and so is Chernobog. I could be weak with her and had to be my strongest, most hardened self with the demon. With these touchstones of my being unmoored, I’m feeling as insubstantial and vitreous as the snowflakes that are falling faster around me now, carried by the wind this way and that. I don’t know who I need to become in order to survive life at court and the gamble for the throne; but I do know that I need to be in control always, clear-headed always. I will not be safe, nor will my people be safe, if I allow myself to be unravelled by Mirnatius and this… I can’t even give a name to it. By the pull of this sweet, delirious madness that robbed me of whatever sense of self I had left last night.

The ermine hisses and leaps forward, and suddenly I can hear it too: thin voices, half-muffled by the snowfall. We take a sudden turn, cut through a cluster of firs, draped in their heavy coat of snow, and there they are.

It’s Miryem, limping and leading a beast of a sharp-antlered deer that is carrying some kind of heavy burden. There is a trail of people struggling through the snow behind her. The snow is a curtain around us now and I can’t see clearly the people who follow her, but some of them shuffle along jerkily or lean on one another, possibly injured.

Miryem halts. Her eyes are puffy, like she might have been crying, but her voice is brisk as always when she says: “You came.”

I nod and allow the ermine to scale my body and curl itself snugly around my neck. “Your messenger made it seem urgent. What happened?”

“We were - “ She stops because the deer stomps its hoof as I draw closer, then undulates its neck in an eerie, reptilian manner before baring its long, sharp canines. Miryem murmurs quiet words to the animal before turning back to me. “Don’t come closer. This one is fractious even on a good day. And now he’s … worried about his master.”

It’s only then that I recognise the bulky, snow-covered shape on the deer’s back. It’s the Staryk king, slumped over and unconscious. The deer’s fur is soaked with the steady stream of droplets running down his arms and legs. One of his legs is bent at an odd angle. I can see that the deadly icicle points that usually adorn his shoulders are gone, and so are the icy edges of his face, which now has the smoothness and stillness of a death mask.

“There was a great fire in the Jewish quarter at Montvilas,” Miryem says. “I don’t now how many died. They’ll by dying for days, because so many are wounded. I took whoever was willing to journey with me to the Staryk realm, but many are too weak to travel, and fear of the Staryk runs deep.” She swallows hard. “People will say that it was the Jews that started the fire. They won’t give them shelter. They will…”

“…be driven away from Montvilas.” My gaze cuts to the men and women who have followed Miryem into this frozen kingdom, knowing well that their prospects in my tsardom are bleak. They are huddling together in the snow, not far from us but half-hidden by the snow flurry, their outlines blurred. 

“What”, I ask, “will the Staryk say when you return with their king wounded and a large group of strangers in tow?”

“We’ll see. What will the tsar say when _you_ return with the news that you’re inviting what’s left of the Jewish community of Montvilas to settle in Koron?”

“We’ll see”, I echo her. “They are my people, too.”

“ _We are not your people_ , tsarina.” Miryem’s mouth thins to a bitter line. “We’re no one’s people, which makes it so much easier to cast us out and take our possessions.”

Once, I had thought that we might become friends. I can still hear the fierce tone in Miryem’s voice when she suggested, that day in the forest, that we lure our monstrous husbands into the same room and make us both widows. I gaze at her through the snow and memorise the lines of her hard, noble face because I want to make sure that I never forget the rawness of this feeling: it’s one thing to claim a tsardom and its people. It’s something all together different to rule. To live every day with the fissures that run through the tsardom’s social body, to assume responsibility for pain and injustice that I might not be able to halt.

Miryem hasn’t sent for me because she wants to be comforted by a friend. She’s sent for me because the horror and wonder through which we have lived these past months means that she possesses something that has never been within reach of her people throughout the long history of Lithvas: the ear of the sovereign.

Not a friend then, but an ally. “Your people,” I say, as I turn to leave, “will have a home in Koron.”

 

 

***

 

I’m an hour late for the council meeting. Late and still rattled by this ill-advised visit to Aleksy’s family. On the way back, Valour threw a shoe and stumbled badly, and I’m not sure if it’s just a strained muscle or something worse, but he is a jittery, sweaty mess in his tie stall and I’d much rather stay with him then talk to my councillors. I can’t though – because ill-suited and pretty spectacularly flawed or not, I _am_ the tsar and if I want to botch things less than I’ve done in the past I need to learn to be the head – not just marionette – of the council.

It won’t do to let Nievsky and the others see that I’ve been rushing to get to the meeting. So I slow myself down right before my guards throw open the doors to the council room and saunter in. And then I stop short because _there she is_.

Irina.

She’s arguing with Nievsky. I have no idea what is going on, but Nievsky looks ready to smash inkpots or the skulls of innocents out of sheer frustration.

Irina’s skin is paler than usual and the little frown between her brows looks like it’s been etched into her skin, never to disappear again. She looks exhausted and a little wild – and I love the fact that she’s wearing the wrong sash with her dress, because it makes me imagine – vividly and deliciously – what it would be like to step behind her right now. I would pull the elegant curve of her back against my body, holding her gently but firmly. She wouldn't relax against me right away, and I’d savour that, too – the delicate tension in her shoulders and neck. I’d hook my finger into her sash, pulling it all the way out and finding a more interesting use for its silken extravagance. And as I do so, I’d put my mouth to her ear, and in whispers and silences I’d tell her everything: what she means to me, my fears, and all my yearning.

“You’re late.” Irina’s actual voice – not the hushed, husky version of her voice that was part of my imagined encounter a moment ago – is cool. Apparently she has found herself a new animal friend because there is an ermine perched on the back of her chair, claws out.

I try a half-smile, but Irina draws herself up taller, forces her shoulders down and exerts vicious control over her entire body until she looks as cold-blooded and serene as one of her Staryk ancestors. It’s like a physical ache, the distance between us.

“From the look of things, I showed up at an interesting juncture in your argument.” I glance at Nievsky. “What is it that you’re discussing?”

“There is nothing to _discuss_ ,” Irina cuts in. “I’ve given orders. They will be obeyed." 

Seeing Irina assert herself in the council room entangles me in a snare of complex emotions. All my old intimates are in attendance: fury and hot jealousy and shame – because her strength will make me look even weaker in comparison. But these feelings are shot through with an utterly ruinous feeling of pride because my darling tsarina is a force to behold when unleashed.

“Alright,” I say. “What are your orders?”

“The tsarina,” Nievsky informs me, voice constricted with rage, “is planning to have half of Koron up in arms against you because she’s wants to invite a couple hundred Jews from Montvilas to settle in Koron. And until they’ve managed to build themselves their own little enclave, the tsarina intends to lend them the new tent shelters that we’ve just bought – for horrendous sums, I’d like to add! – for our very own regiment!”

“I see. Why can’t the Jews stay in Montvilas?”

Irina looks at me like I’m a second Nievsky, only more annoying and less intelligent. “We don’t have time for this.”

It’s like a slap in the face. “You don’t have time to talk to me about an issue that is clearly important to you?”

“We need to send help to Montvilas _now_ ,” Irina says. “If you hadn’t been out riding all morning with your guest you’d surely have had time to read the latest dispatches from Montvilas. The Jewish quarter of Montvilas was burned to the ground last night." 

“It’s a bad idea to invite such a large Jewish community to the capital city.” My words come out slowly, but my thoughts are racing. “If conflicts between the Jews and the city population erupt here – in the capital city – word will soon spread and people up and down the country will take this as further evidence that Jews cause nothing but problems. We’d better move them to a provincial backwater where feelings aren’t running quite so high. The south, I think, would be best – somewhere where the first summer harvests are already in and there’s plenty of food for everyone. Not up here, where even bread is dear.”

Irina looks at me like I’ve betrayed what little trust she’s had in me. “ _Don’t_ challenge me. Not today.”

I take two quick steps in her direction, but Irina puts a hand out and all but physically recoils from me. It rattles me and my words come out harsher than intended. “It’s a tactical mistake. You’ve never made one, not once. Do you really want to start now?”

Her eyes go wide and the fingers of her left hand curl briefly into the sleeve of her dress. I’ve learned to read her well over these past months: She knows I’m right, or likely right. In the past, she’d have quickly conceded my point, I’m sure of that. But not today. Not after last night.

“How dare you?” There are two angry red slashes across her cheeks. It’s clear as day that she regrets what happened between us. I don’t know what heady mixture of desperate need and self-delusion made her mine last night, but it’s taken only a few brief hours for this feeling to alchemise into contempt. “Do you really think that you’re in a position to advise me about strategy?” Irina’s voice is unsteady. “ _You_?”

“Probably not.” Breathing is a laboured, painful thing. I turn to leave. “But it doesn’t make me less right.”

 

 

***

The palace gardens have been transformed into an Eastern extravaganza: graceful tents are dotted across the lawn, lit from inside and softly glowing in the gathering dusk. The branches of the ancient trees are adorned with lanterns and strings of coloured glass beads. Fire-breathers and costumed boys on stilts are mingling with the revellers, and even the warm summer gale seems a little tipsy, carrying crushed hibiscus petals this way and that, wantonly toying with the tulle of the ladies’ summer dresses.

I’m sweating in my ceremonial robes, and I’m also finding it harder and harder to remain still and statuesque as gnats find my bare wrists and neck, feasting on me while I plough through my long public address, welcoming Princess Elisabeth of Habsburg to our court and thanking Prince Casimir’s high-strung wards, who have masterminded tonight’s revels. The two of them have stepped forward to bask in the attention, and now their gaze flits between me and Irina, assessing and calculating, no doubt getting ready to sting, too.

Beside me, Irina is austere and resplendent in her Staryk silver. Seemingly unaffected by the heat, she’s wearing a tightly-laced white overcoat over her dress, neck hidden behind a gorgeous crimped collar, hands gloved. She looks like the frigid princess of a kingdom of eternal winter, aloof and unattainable. Every time I glance at her, my mind flashes back to glimpses of her delicately flushed skin, the abandonment in her eyes. Desire and hurt and confusion are slowly driving me insane.

I wish I could slip away – find a quiet bower or hide in one of the trees, until the celebrations are over and I can finally stop smiling, stop pretending, and be alone with my thoughts. Ever since the council meeting, my mind has been this noisy riot of inchoate fears and speculations, fury and shame, all bleeding into one another like spilled oils on a canvas. No matter how hard I try, I can’t control my spinning thoughts, can’t seem to take hold of and untangle just a single idea.

“Together with Princess Elisabeth we have prepared a surprise entertainment for tonight.” Casimir’s ward – the girl – turns around so that all the assembled courtiers can hear her, but her wicked little smile is intended for my eyes only. An excited titter runs through the crowd. “Princess Elisabeth’s erudition and her detailed knowledge of Koron’s history put us all to shame,” she continues. “So well is she versed in the mythologies and manners of Lithvas, one might think her own destiny tied to the fate of the realm.”

I can see Nievsky raise his glass to this, and quite a few of the courtiers join him.

“Enlighten us then,” I say. “What kind of entertainment are we looking forward to?”

Elisabeth steps forward herself, breathless with delight. “Since the history of this illustrious palace dates back to the days of myth,” she announces brightly, “and since you’ve just recently celebrated Dragon Day, we thought it apt to hold games modelled on the maiden tribute of Koron.”

There are squeals of fake outrage and authentic delight. It’s a perfectly pitched piquancy. According to the myth, the ancient inhabitants of Koron were compelled to send once every year a tribute to the dragon. Five beautiful virgins were chosen annually, and flung naked and blindfolded into the labyrinth of tunnels underneath the palace, there to wander until they were devoured by the dragon.

Elisabeth clasps her dainty hands together. “We’d like to invite everyone to step over to the viewing platform of the maze.”

I have a bad feeling about this, but the courtiers are already tripping over each other to secure themselves the best seats. Elisabeth takes my arm. “What _fun_! What are you waiting for? Surely the games cannot start without the tsar!”

I turn to Irina, but she has already left: she must hate this kind of frivolity, and is probably using this as an excuse to withdraw. But a moment later, I notice the bright sparkle of her crown besides the viewing platform. She is talking agitatedly to Nievsky and two other councilmen. Not far from her, a couple of wide-eyed young girls – servants from the palace kitchen, I think – are huddled together under a tree.

“You can’t stop this now, tsarina.” That’s Nievsky’s smug voice. “Surely you don’t want to affront our guest, daughter of Lithvas’s most important political ally.”

“These girls won’t be threatened. Or shamed.” Irina steps in front of the viewing platform. She raises her voice and it carries, cold and inflectionless, unless all the courtiers fall silent. “You’d be bad masters of the revels,” she addresses Elisabeth and Casimsir’s wards, “if you didn’t tell us the rules of this game." 

“But of course –“ Elisabeth has taken a seat in the first row of chairs on the viewing platform. She rises gracefully and addresses Irina from above. “The maze has acquired some new features to make it a little more interesting, you see. You’d be better able to see them if you joined us up here, tsarina. If you’d studied the myth of your realm, you’d know, for instance, that the dragon’s labyrinth contained a garden of swords, a sea of fire and seven snakes. I think it’s fair to say that only the bravest and strongest of our five beautiful maidens will likely reach the heart of the labyrinth unscathed.”

The courtiers howl and giggle with delight. Out of the corner of my eye I can see one of the servant girls bolt behind the tree to vomit. This is wrong, so wrong, and I have no idea how to stop it. But stop it, I _will_.

I step besides Irina, raise my hand and open my mouth to speak – But Irina trumps me. “I’m glad to find that you’ve familiarised yourself so thoroughly with Koron’s treasure trove of myths,” she says calmly. “Surely, you will have read about the dragon’s stipulations: Lithvas was given a choice after all - the choice to sacrifice five maidens annually, or to end the yearly tribute once and for all by offering the dragon the tsarina herself.” 

“No.” The word comes out so shocked and rough I hardly recognise my own voice. “Don’t.” 

“I’m the tsarina of Lithvas,” Irina says into the tense silence. “I will compete - for these girls and for my people. There will be no more games after this one.”

I want to step in her way, force her to reconsider. But I know it’s not my place, and when I speak, it’s not to stop her. “As anyone would expect, my memory of Lithvas’s mythology is rather hazy.” Laughter on the viewing platform. A deepening frown line one Irina’s brow. I drop to one knee before her and gaze upwards into her wide eyes. “But I seem to remember that when the dragon forbid all men of honour to follow the maidens into the labyrinth, the wind joined them instead, traveled with them into the depths of the earth, and carried their moans and cries back to the families to whom they were forever lost." 

Irina swallows. “And so?”

“And so I’ll be the wind. I’ll come with you if you let me.”

She’s silent for so long I think she’s working out how best to humiliate me in front of the court. But then she nods. “Alright.”

Above us, on the viewing platform, Elisabeth claps but her voice sounds a little too shrill. “What a charming turn of events!”

Irina ignores her. She takes off the crimped collar and unbuttons her heavy overcoat. Underneath, she’s wearing a white dress made up of several layers of gossamer-thin lace that leaves most of her lovely shoulders and arms bare. She’d worn the collar tied to tightly – it’s left a line of faint red marks on the white skin of her neck and I want to lick them up like sorbet.

Instead, I glower at the crowd on the viewing platform who eye her hungrily. Elisabeth steps forward and lets two red silken ribbons drop to the ground. “The maidens,” she points out, “were bound and blindfolded.” 

I pick up the ribbons. I’m vaguely aware that Elisabeth is still talking, but her words are drowned out by the thunderous sound of my pulse in my ears as I turn to Irina. Her breath is as shallow as mine. A scarlet flush steals across the arch of her cheekbones, and her eyes are dark with fear and something I cannot read. I wish I could draw her into my arms to reassure her. I wish I could kiss the slight tremble from her lips. Instead, I take her hand, turn it around and brush my lips against her open palm. Before drawing back, I nip sharply at her tender skin, hear her intake of breath, and press a lewd kiss to the abused skin.

I don’t let go of her hand but draw her to me, until I can feel each of her rapid breaths against my chest, can feel her softness against me, and smell the rose soap that she uses. “It’s just a game, squirrel”, I whisper into her ear as I move both of her hands behind her back and tie them with the ribbon. “You may not think so, but we’re actually quite good at those, you and I.”

She makes a sound that comes out as a shaky laugh. “I’m so scared,” she murmurs.

“So am I. But we’ve got this. I promise.” I show her the other ribbon, brush it gently against her cheek. “Wear this for me?”

She bites her lip, hesitates – and it’s so alluring that I come close to forgetting that we’re actually in a bit of a pickle here. I put my mouth to her ear again. “You have ruined me, utterly and completely. I want you so much, you have no idea…”

Her gaze meets mine and there is wariness in her eyes paired with a new softness that makes me feel humbled, enchanted all over again and more than anything desperate to be worthy of her. “Close your eyes, love.”

She does. As I slip the blindfold over her eyes, I nudge my nose against hers and when she lifts her chin in answer, I gently press my lips against hers. It lasts only for the briefest of moments, because this is not the time or place for the kind of kiss that I long to deliver. But it’s painfully sweet: Irina makes a low, surprised sound of pleasure and right before I draw back, she runs the tip of her tongue very softly against the seam of my lips, stealing all the air from my lungs.

“Minx,” I whisper. “You haven’t got the faintest idea how tight these trousers are.”

She’s laughing quietly and it’s the loveliest sound in the world.

“I think you need to be punished. How about we throw you into a labyrinth, hands tied and blindfolded?”

“You mean the labyrinth which would admit no honourable man?”

“Precisely. I bet you’ve never been gladder to be married to the least honourable man in the realm.”

Her hand finds mine. “I’m no longer sure that’s the case. Be with me?”

“Always.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to see a very charming picture of Irina and her ermine (which is going to stick around for a while), google Da Vinci's "Lady with an Ermine" - which, nice coincidence, hangs in the National Museum in Krakow. It's how I've always pictured Irina. :)


End file.
